


If You're Reading This, Steve Rogers

by fallendarlings



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canon Divergence - Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Canon Divergence - Post-Avengers (2012), Depressed Steve Rogers, Depression, Epilepsy, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Mutual Pining, POV Steve Rogers, Post-Avengers (2012), Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, Slow Burn, Smoking, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers-centric, Suicidal Thoughts, Swing Dancing, Touch-Starved, epileptic bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:00:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 39,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21821830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallendarlings/pseuds/fallendarlings
Summary: Nobody tells Steve it's okay to cry.Nobody touches him.Nobody remembers Steve Rogers is a person under the mantle. It's okay. He hasn't felt like a person since he watched Bucky fall.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 187
Kudos: 1199
Collections: Stucky: Canon Divergence





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I guess this could be considered a different take on what might have happened in the 2012 timeline after Steve finds out that Bucky is alive. Ironically, I started writing this last December, before we ever even knew the title of Endgame, let alone what the plot would be. So no, this isn't Endgame compliant or inspired or anything. I've had this in my drafts for a year and had the idea for it for even longer... according to my note where I first wrote the plot down, since December of 2017. This isn't the fic I had originally planned to write next but I'm finding it more difficult to move on from my last fic than I thought it would be and I'm really not done talking about Steve Rogers' mental health. I don't think I ever will be but I'm hoping that writing this will help me transition to being able to write what I wanted to release next. So... yeah. Enjoy!

_1945_

Sitting with his legs dangling over the edge of a steep cliff somewhere in the Alps, Steve Rogers hesitantly unclasps the buckles of the pack holding the entirety of Bucky Barnes’ meager worldly possessions. It’s been seventeen hours since the fall. One night. Sunlight is beginning to peek over the mountains, painting the sky with gold and pinks and purples that even a day earlier he might have gaped at in wonder, still in awe that so much color could exist, even though he’d had the serum for two years now. 

He really doesn’t care now. 

In fact, he’d give it all up in an instant and return to Brooklyn in his thin, sickly body, hurtling straight for death far before he was ready if it meant he would have Bucky back. 

He bites his lip until the iron taste of blood touches his tongue and glares at the pack he’s cursed to be the one to go through. “God dammit, Buck,” he whispers. The sunlight glints off the metal clasps as he flips the bag open. Right on top is a tin of Lucky Strike cigarettes, only two left in it. He holds it up to his nose, breathing in the scent that used to make him choke. It doesn’t anymore, he knows that logically. Has even partaken in sharing a few with his best friend after particularly rough missions. He’s never really developed a taste for them, but well. Bucky isn’t coming back. He will never have a use for these. With shaking hands he takes one, placing it between his lips and fumbling for the matches at the bottom of the tin. He strikes one against the rocky edge of the cliff, lighting the cigarette. 

Smoke scratches the back of his throat, coats his tongue in the bitter taste of tobacco. It tastes like Bucky- the way he smelled when he came home late at night after being out dancing. He hadn’t even smoked around Steve, ever, until the war. But dance halls, by nature, were full of the stuff. Every time Bucky would come home, the scent was clinging to him. His clothes, reeking of it when Steve did the wash; his _skin_ , always so warm when he’d crawled into their little shared bed, slotting behind Steve as carefully as he could to not disturb his sleep. Except Bucky hadn’t known that Steve never went to sleep until he was home safe. 

He exhales a cloud of smoke, a harsh, heavy breath, and turns his attention back to the pack. 

There’s a canteen, half full of icy water. A stack of postcards and letters, tied together with twine, some from his parents and sister, some from Steve before they had reunited in Austria. Playing cards and a leather pouch of money. Bandages and Penicillin, a little kit with a pair of tweezers and a needle and thread to extract bullets and stitch up wounds, boxes of ammo, and an extra pair of socks with holes in both the heels. At the very bottom is a sealed envelope. Curious that it isn’t in the stack with the other letters. He picks it up and sets the pack beside him before flipping it over to see who it’s from. Except there’s no address, neither from sender or for who it should be sent to. Only _To My Sweetheart_ written in Bucky’s looping script across the front, the ink blotted at the end. 

Steve flicks the butt of the burned out cigarette into the gorge. He traces his fingertips over the three words. Bucky had a sweetheart. And Steve hadn’t even known about her. It aches, deep in his chest, hand in hand with the dark emptiness trying to consume him. Bucky is gone. He’s _gone_ and it’s Steve’s fault. He’ll never get the chance to ask about this sweetheart, this secret even from him. Never get to see Bucky blush or hear him sing her praises because clearly she’d been something special if he’d kept the secret that close to his heart. Fuck, he’ll never hear Bucky’s voice again. 

He hasn’t cried yet. 

It’s strange. When his mother had died, the world was numbed, like looking through a filthy window, only barely able to make out what was happening around him. He’s numb now too, but the world is as clear as ever. He can feel the icy wetness seeping through his pants from the snow. Can see the birds flitting through the trees all the way across the gorge. 

Bucky had told him a bit about Azzano, how after a while he couldn’t process the pain anymore while he was being tortured and though he could still feel it, it felt like it was apart from him in some way. This is like that, he thinks. This is the worst thing that he could possibly ever experience. 

Steve eyes the seal of the envelope. There’s no name on it and he hadn’t known Bucky had a steady girl at all. So surely Bucky had intended someone to read it so they knew who to send it to. He just can’t bring himself to open it. Bucky hadn’t wanted him to know, that much is clear. Perhaps he’ll give it to Peggy and she’ll be able to see to it that it gets to the person it’s intended for. But he won’t read it. Can’t. 

A hand settles on Steve’s shoulder and he jumps, crumpling the envelope in his grip. 

“Cap,” Gabe Jones tightens his grip for a moment before releasing him. “Didn’t mean to startle you. Stark is almost here. We need to get up to the extraction point.” 

“Right.” Steve shakes his head, dropping the letter back into Bucky’s pack. “I’ll be right there.” He waits until Gabe has disappeared back in the direction of camp before he stands, hugging the bag to his chest. The steep drop off in front of him is tantalizing, entreating him to just end it already. Bucky’s body is down there somewhere, dashed apart on the sharp rocks at the bottom. He could join him. It would be so easy. Just one step and a swoop of his stomach like riding the Cyclone and it would all be over. 

But Hydra is still out there and someone has to pay for Bucky’s death. He turns on his heel and heads off through the woods toward camp. He’ll finish his mission. And then he’ll rest. 

And no one can bring him back. 

***

_2012_

The apartment is sterile. White walls and grey furniture that’s lush in ways that he would never have dreamed of before. Shining marble slabs make up the massive kitchen counters, sparkling in the light from the wall sized picture window that looks out over the Manhattan skyline. On the kitchen table is a stack of thick files, and three boxes, respectively labeled iPhone, Macbook Air, and iPad. Whatever that means. 

The nervous redheaded agent that has shadowed his every step since they let him out of debriefing is darting around the room, talking a mile a minute about how everything is top of the line technology, only the best for Captain Rogers. 

“Of course, there’s still a lot of paperwork to work through, but I imagine once everything is cleared they’ll change your rank to one more fitting a man of your service record, Sir.” The agent, really barely more than a boy tugs on his wildly curling hair. “Your devices have already been set up and there’s a file with detailed instructions and lists of how to change your passwords if you want. I’m available to help, of course, should you desire it. Anything you need, just let us know and we can get it for you. There’s also instruction sheets for all of your kitchen appliances and your pantry is fully stocked with everything you could need to cook but if you want, you can give me a list of meals you would like and I can arrange to have them delivered at your convenience. I know you must still be disoriented and cooking wouldn’t be something anyone would want to deal with in your position.” 

Steve’s head aches, throbbing in his left temple like a hammer. He just wants to sleep. “Thank you, that won’t be necessary. I have some experience with cooking and will manage just fine. If you don’t mind though, I’d like to rest for a while.” 

“Certainly, Captain Rogers. My number is in your provided phone, just give me a call if you need anything.” He hesitates for only a moment before marching back out of the door. 

The lock clicks, loud in the silence that descends on the soundproofed apartment. Even the constant noise from the city has faded into only a hint that it had ever been there at all. There’s an open door in the wall to Steve’s right, but he can’t bring himself to move toward it. So this is it. He’d thought he would be finally giving in, finally letting death take him. Going hand in hand with the reaper. Going to Bucky. But the only place he had ended up is here. 

Entirely alone. 

He can’t feel his limbs. It’s all white noise in every nerve, his brain too loud to focus on anything physical anymore. He wraps his arms around his ribs, stumbling back against the front door as his knees give out and he sinks to the floor. The wood is waxed to such a sheen that it’s nearly a mirror, his distorted reflection shaking violently as he gasps and gasps for air that won’t fill his lungs. 

His eyes are dry. 

“It was supposed to end,” he whispers to no one. “I can’t even manage to die.” Poetic irony maybe that for the majority of his life, death had been breathing over his shoulder, chasing after him, on his heels no matter how fast he ran from it. And when he finally turned and reached to greet the end like an old friend, it was gone from him. Refusing to release him from the prison of continuing this wretched life any longer. 

He should try again. The Valkyrie is lauded as the most heroic act of military history apparently, not as the suicide it had actually been. They wouldn’t know he was the way he was in his mind. There would be knives in the kitchen and guns in the weapons safe that was apparently in the back of his closet. It would work. 

But he’s so tired, cold and aching in his very bones, unable to even lift his head. Everyone is gone. Not just Bucky. _Everyone_. Nick Fury had been straight to the point; the Commandos, dead. Howard, dead. Rebecca Barnes, dead. Peggy. Not dead but her mind ravaged by memory loss so severe that she might as well be a shell of the woman she once was. 

Steve doesn’t believe in angels or gods. He hasn’t in a long time. Not since he saw the first man disintegrated by blue lighting. But he’d grown up on the stories from the bible and they haunt him now. He’s like Cain, the serum his mark that curses him to wander the earth. Alone. Forever. 

The agent had mentioned something about a gym in the building and another one about a block away. He can’t bring himself to put a bullet in his head or a knife in his heart. But he can go and he can punch things without wrapping his knuckles. He can paint his pain on the side of a sand bag in his own blood until the skin peels away from his hands and the bones are exposed to the air and light, beautifully cracked. Maybe it will hurt enough to fill the hole where his spirit used to be. Maybe it will be enough to finally make him cry. 

***

After the Battle of New York, he moves into Avengers Tower. The floor that had been given to him and renovated into a modern home is no less sterile and impersonal than the last, but at least he has friends now, sort of. Natasha comes by every day and talks to him no matter how his mood is. Even if he doesn’t talk back or even look at her, she’s there, with stories of Russia and the KGB in the Cold War. With movies and TV shows she forces him to watch with her. Some were slightly horrifying; others, like the endless Disney movies and Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter pushes away the black haze that surrounded him constantly, making him smile and even laugh a couple of times. The massive leaps of improvement in art since the forties is something that lights up a part of him he hadn’t been sure would ever work again. But every time he turns, already ready to exclaim over it to Bucky and he isn’t there, it was almost like watching him fall all over again. 

He starts smoking Lucky Strikes, sometimes a pack or two a day. Tony had caught him lighting one up once and promptly informed him that smoking caused lung cancer and asthma. That had been a shock, his many years of smoking asthma cigarettes flashing across his mind. It really is a wonder he lived to take the serum. Not that the effects of smoking can harm him now. And tobacco is one of the only things that still smells the same. He still doesn’t like the taste of them, but it’s comforting in its own way. 

There’s a training gym in the tower, with enforced equipment that holds up to his and Thor’s strength, not that Thor is around that much. Steve is deep in thought at the punching bag, his bare fists flying one right after the other, too fast to really see when Tony saunters in, a yellowed cardboard box in his arms. 

“Cap, I have something for you here.” 

Steve drops his arms to his side, his chest heaving. His hands ache distantly but it’s nice in its own way. To feel something that you can control. They’re probably dripping blood all over the floor, if Tony’s slightly horrified expression is anything to go by, but he doesn’t care. He clasps them behind his back and walks over to where Tony has set the box on a bench. 

“I was going through one of my father’s old storage buildings upstate. Found this.” Tony waves a hand at the box. “Just…read the label. I think it belongs to you.” 

The writing is faded with age, the corners of the label curling and discolored, but he can read it. It’s his handwriting after all. Spiky and wavering from how his hands had shaken every moment between the train and the crash. 

_Personal Effects of Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes: 32557038_

“Oh god,” he whispers. 

“After the war, when Dad partnered with SHIELD, he let them use some of his buildings as records storage. It’s confusing how this box didn’t make it back to his next of kin but-”

“I was listed as his next of kin.” His voice is faint even in his own ears. “And he was mine.” He reaches up to touch the dog tags around his neck. “They took my tags, you know. The ones I had around my neck when I crashed. They switched them before I woke up. Gave me new ones.” 

“Why?” Tony cocks his head to the side, squinting at him. “Were they rusty from the water or something?” 

He swallows. “No. Maybe. I don’t know. But they took them from me because they weren’t mine. They were his. We swapped. It’s the only thing of him I had left and now it’s gone.” It’s a bitter truth, another thing that he’s lost to the future. It’s stupid, to be so attached to a bit of metal, a necklace around his neck. But he can still feel the warmth of Bucky’s fingers grazing his skin as he’d looped the chain around Steve’s neck that night walking back to base from the bar in London, fastening the back. Can still hear him saying, quiet like a secret, _War is hell, Steve. It’s going to take pieces of you that you don’t even know you have to give. I’m like cracked glass now, chipped and barely holding together. It’s going to do the same thing to you. I don’t have much left to give, but you keep these tags and let them remind you that you have a piece of me. I’m with you._

“I already know what’s in here,” his handprint in blood stains the lid when he rests his hand on it for a moment. “I was the one who went through his things after the fall and boxed them up. There’s nothing in here he wanted me to have. But I’m grateful for it anyway because anything is better than nothing.” These are the pieces of Bucky. The contents of the box is all that’s left. And Steve is greedy. He wants every piece of Bucky that there is- not just one. He wants the whole thing, broken glass or not. Steve’s pretty shattered these days himself. Just as Bucky said he would be. 

Tony looks uncomfortable but he puts a hand on Steve’s shoulder and says, “Why don’t you sit down, pal? I can find some bandages for your hands because no offense, they look grotesque. Please take the proper precautions next time you feel the need to punch the shit out of a bag.” He can’t actually make Steve move if he doesn’t want to but when he pushes on his shoulder trying to get him to sit on the bench, Steve does. He’s too tired not to. “Natasha and I can put out some feelers in SHIELD and get your dog tags back. It wasn’t their property to take from you in the first place. Anything else from your past before the war, be it yours or his, probably ended up in the Captain America and The Howling Commandos exhibit in the Smithsonian or in the hands of private collectors. You’re within your right to claim back anything from the museum that you want although I couldn’t say the same about the collectors. They’re a snobby bunch and won’t part with hard bought memorabilia easily. If you really want though, I can get my lawyers on it.” 

“No, it’s fine. We barely had anything in the first place. The only things I might care about getting back are my old sketchbooks.” 

“I’ll have JARVIS look into it. You stay put,” Tony pats his shoulder. “I’m gonna find you some bandages, some super strength booze, and a therapist. In that order. We’re gonna help you get better, Steve.” He walks off, but stops halfway across the room, looking over his shoulder. “Quick question- and you totally don’t have to answer if it makes you uncomfortable- you and Barnes….my father always said you were closer to each other than anyone he had ever seen. And the thing with trading your tags… did that friendship go deeper than the historians like to say?” 

Steve can’t stop the way he cringes, his thoughts already blocking themselves off even as they come to mind. “You know, I imagine in this box that there’s an envelope addressed ‘To My Sweetheart’. It was in the bottom of his pack when I went through it. He never once spoke to me of being in love with anyone, ever. So. Evidently not as close as Howard and I both thought.” 

“I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t be.” There had never been a future beyond war for them anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> self harm warning on this one folks, please read with caution. 
> 
> my nana passed away very suddenly this past wednesday but i already had this chapter finished so im going ahead and updating but i may have to take some time when i run out of prewritten chapters. i don't know if i'll be able to write. then again, it may turn cathartic and i might be able to write massive chapters in single sittings. i don't know. i'm not in a good place right now, it's a very rough loss. my nana lived with us my entire life and without anyone even realizing it, she was the glue that held us all together so this is very like losing a parent more than a grandparent. i have family in from out of state and lots of stress right now so please send good vibes. it's especially hard because of the holiday. i won't be having a good christmas and i'm not receiving presents but for those of you celebrating i hope you have a good day and get all the gifts you wanted. 
> 
> anastasia

“In your own words, why don’t you tell me why you’re here, Steve?”

“Because my teammates have decided that I’m traumatized from the war and severely depressed and that my coping mechanisms are unhealthy.” Steve glares at his knees. “Also Natasha is terrifying and won’t take no for an answer.” She’s probably lurking outside the door or in the vents to make sure he’s actually participating in the therapy session and not sullenly ignoring everything asked of him.

“Do you think your coping mechanisms are unhealthy?” The therapist is a tiny short haired brunette woman. Her dark eyes are blinking and enormous behind her thick rimmed glasses. She has bright green nails that tap out a rhythm on the tablet she’s using to take notes.

“I’m the picture of health, Maryam.” She had insisted they call each other by their first names, to _help foster trust between them_. “In fact, they tell me I’m not even physically capable of being unhealthy.”

“Your body, perhaps. I’m not a medical doctor and we aren’t here to talk about that. Your mental state isn’t determined by the serum, Steve.” She sets the tablet aside and leans forward, folding her hands across her knees. “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it. You don’t have to. I’m not here to force you to say anything you’re uncomfortable with. We don’t know each other and I’d like to use this first session to learn about each other so we are more comfortable around each other. I want you to be able to feel like you can express yourself and to know that it won’t ever leave this room if you don’t want it to and you won’t be judged on anything you say. Are you okay with that?”

He nods. Grudgingly. Maybe he doesn’t have to talk _today_ but it’s still terribly invasive, this therapy business. It’s one thing to talk to Nat or even Tony sometimes about how sad and exhausted he is all the time, but this is a stranger no matter what she says about becoming ‘comfortable around each other’. And his friends have betrayed him and strong armed him into talking to her, so maybe he shouldn’t tell them anything anymore either.

“So, what was your favorite hobby growing up?”

“I was an artist.” It still aches in his chest sometimes, like a vital part of him is missing even though he hasn’t touched a pencil or brush in years. “I couldn’t play baseball in the streets with the other kids, though I tried for a while. My heart was never strong enough. So I started doodling and eventually I learned things and progressed to being able to make a living from it when I needed the money.”

“You must be very talented. Do you still enjoy art?” Maryam smiles but he still gets the impression that it’s a loaded question. “Digital art is a popular medium that a lot of artists utilize nowadays. Has anyone introduced you to digital drawing programs?”

“I haven’t drawn anything more than strategy plans since before I started leading the Howling Commandos. There were never enough supplies during the war to waste our paper and pencils on frivolities like art and since-” Well. “Since I woke up, I just haven’t felt like it. I mentioned something about my old sketchbooks to Tony but we didn’t really go into it beyond that.”

“It can be hard to retain passion for things we once cared about if we’re going through a rough emotional period.” She pulls another tablet out of her bag and an odd pen that she uses to tap on the screen before she hands it to him with a smile. The screen is a blank white space, with choices of color and brush stroke at the top. “I don’t want you to feel like I’m pushing you to do something and you absolutely can hand this back to me if you want nothing to do with it. But you can doodle throughout the session if you want, even if it’s nothing but scribbles or shapes. You might find it soothing. And if you don’t that’s still absolutely okay.”

His heart thuds in his ears as he stares at the screen and the pen in his hand. “It just draws like a regular pencil?”

“There are some differences, like choosing the brush style, what color you want or how opaque you want your lines to be, but for the most part, yes. It takes some getting used to, switching from physical to digital art, I should know, I’ve done it. But it’s something you figure out as you go along.”

“You draw?”

“Not as much as I would like. I minored in art when I was in college and I illustrated comics to help pay for my tuition.” She pushes her glasses up. “I don’t have as much time for it anymore around my job but it’s still one of my favorite stress reliefs.”

He hesitantly touches the pen to the tablet, drawing a line. Just a line, but one he knows down to his very soul. One he’s drawn hundreds of times before. “They made comics about me when I was started the USO tour. Terrible stuff, but I guess it made the kids happy.” He doesn’t want to think about _what_ he’s drawing, he just wants it to take shape blindly.

“Yeah, I read them when I was in high school. They’re available in an online archive now.” Maryam doesn’t comment on the fact that he was drawing or exclaim over it being a big step in his ‘healing’ like he would have expected a therapist to do from his brief internet searches before this appointment. “Do you like comics?”

“Not really. You’d think I would, as an artist. But I always preferred the classics. Every time I was sick, Bucky would read Anne of Green Gables to me. It got real old after a while but it was his favorite. He loved stories.”

Bucky had lived in a made up world sometimes, where he didn’t seem to notice the bad around him, always too preoccupied with the good. The Stark Expo had been his favorite thing ever; he had spent weeks dreaming about what new inventions might be revealed at the show. He’d love to be here, in the future with Steve. With all these amazing things like sports cars and televisions the size of a wall in your own home. The phones that you could take anywhere with you and the breathtaking things they were capable of accomplishing. And no one seemed to care, too used to them for them to seem like the awe inspiring things that they really are. He stares into the laughing eyes that he had drawn like a reflex. Eyes that will never look back into his again unless it was from a screen or a photograph.

He might throw up.

“I can’t do this,” he gasps, dropping the tablet like it’s burning the skin off his hands. “I have to go. I can’t be here, I can’t think about this.”

“Steve, wait please-”

He barely registers Maryam’s words as he bolts for the elevator, pressing the call button repeatedly. His hands shake, slick with sweat and slipping on the chrome button. The doors slide open _finally_ and he stumbles inside, clenching the railing so tightly the metal dents under the pressure of his fingers. “JARVIS, the gym. Please, as fast as you can.”

“Of course, Captain Rogers.” The AI quiets long enough for the elevator to start moving upwards with a jerk. “You appear to be having a panic attack, Captain. Would you like to try some calming breathing techniques? Dr. Banner finds them most agreeable.”

He doesn’t want to breathe. He wants to rip his chest open with his own hands and claw out the heart that won’t stop beating, the stubborn ghost of his soul. He wants to bleed and bleed and watch his lungs give out like they should have eighty years ago. He wants to punch things until his bones are splinters. He wants to be in control again.

“Captain?”

“The gym, JARVIS. And make sure no one else but me can get in.”

***

The skin on his hands is still shredded the next morning when he walks into his kitchen and finds Natasha sitting at the island. One hand is resting on a thick file and a red book. The other is holding a tumbler of clear liquid. He’s pretty sure it isn't water. The light of the rising sun is glinting off her hair. So bright red it’s like a fiery curtain of curls.

"You feel better about yourself for destroying your hands?" She takes a sip of her drink, her face impassive.

He looks at the raw skin, swollen around the joints where white bone shows when he flexes his hands. It hurts, a dull throbbing agony from the tips of his fingers all the way to his shoulders. It’s probably fucked up that he loves it, that he aches to go to the gym now and keep going and never stop. "They'll heal." The bones have already realigned themselves at some point during the night.

"Just because you heal faster doesn't mean that you should fuck yourself up to watch it happen." One brow arches. "That's why we had you go to the therapist, which I'll remind you, you ran out of like your hair was on fire not half an hour into the session."

"It's none of your business."

"I'm a spy. Everything's my business. And besides, you're my friend. I care about you. This-" she indicates his hands, "isn't you getting better." Her lips purse as she looks down at the unlabeled file. "I'm not here to talk about that though. In the three months since you've been here, I debated a long time about looking for the information in this file. At first I wasn't even sure if my suspicions were true, I'm not sure if I hoped that they were or that they weren't. It's...not pretty. I'm still not sure if _you're_ even remotely in a place where you can handle this. But if there's even a chance that chasing down this thread will help you, then I'm willing to take that risk. Because you _are_ my friend and I can't, in good consciousness, sit back and let you retreat so far into yourself that there's nothing but a self-destructive shell left."

"What is this about, Natasha?" He sits at the bar, reaching for an apple but she stays his hand with hers.

"I'm going to tell you a story about Russia. About a red haired robot child they called Natalia. And about a monster with a metal arm who was kind when the handlers weren't looking, who took the punishments for things he didn't do to spare the little girls. I called him Призрак. Ghost." She releases his wrist. Her fingers are trembling. Only slightly but it’s enough. "This isn't a nice story, it's one that will give you nightmares and you'll probably be sick after hearing it. But I have to tell it to you. As long as you promise you will never tell it to anyone else."

He clenches his hands into fists to hide the fact that he’s shaking too. Confused, yes. But also nauseated and breathless already because this is unlike Natasha and he isn't sure how it will tie into the file or to him. "I promise."

She brings the tumbler to her mouth and takes a long drink. "I was ten, when I met him. In the Red Room, ten years old was the first big test. Only half of the girls being trained would make it to the next stage. The way they determined who moved on and who didn't was through us. Each of us had to pick a target out of our classmates and we had to kill them. That was how we won, how we got to graduate to the next step of training. I didn't care about anything or anyone by that point. I only cared about surviving. There was another girl, Polina. She was bigger and stronger than I was and I hated her for always beating me. I hated being second best. So one morning I took a pair of scissors and I slit her throat while she was braiding her hair."

"Jesus, Nat." Steve can't see her face; she has her chin so far down that her hair falls in a curtain, shielding her from his gaze. She’s never even given a hint of weakness before in the entire time he had known her and yet here she is, shoulders hunched and almost shaking, her voice faint.

He’s pretty sure he was the only person in the world she’s told this story to.

"Please, don't interrupt. I won't be able to finish. And I have to finish." She takes a deep breath. "When we graduated to our next level of training, they told us that we were going to be taught by a new handler. But he would teach only the most flawless and so we went through six months of absolutely brutal training in preparation. I made a noise one time and got my hips dislocated for my trouble. But I was the diamond, their prized pupil. When I wasn't training, I was already being sent on missions, killing who I was told needed to be killed. I never questioned a thing. They called me the little bloody one.

"When I had completed my preparation training, they took me to meet him. They told me that he was a perfect machine and that I should work hard and please him. Then they locked me in a room with him. I didn't see him at first until he stepped out of the shadows and the first thing I noticed was his arm. Made entirely of metal, with a red star on the bicep. The second was the bruises and burns on his face." She finally looks up at him, her face so pale it’s nearly grey. "The Red Room was in the possession of a chair. If someone was put in this chair, their arms would be clamped in metal cuffs to keep them in it, a rubber guard was put in their mouth, and then a head piece descended over their face. Like so," she places cold hands on his face, one cupping his temple and cheekbone and the other over the other side of his face. "It electrocuted. Torturously high volts of electricity, straight to the brain. Targeting the location in the brain where emotional memories are stored. They were geniuses in a sick way. They created a way to entirely erase a person. A trip to the chair and like that," she snaps her fingers, "all remembrance of who you are and who you've loved. Gone." She drains her glass on the next sip. "I was six when they put me in the chair the first time, after they took me from my family. All it took was once and I was a perfectly clean slate for them to write on. It's how I recognized the markings on his face. I had worn them too.

"They had told horror stories of what this man, this perfect machine was capable of. Stories of what he had done and the assassinations he had pulled off so successfully that if not for the bullet holes in their foreheads, people would have assumed the victims had dropped dead of their own accord. He was so good, he was invisible. I was scared to meet him. I needn't have been. He was a broken record. He didn't even know his own name. So I called him Ghost. He was kind to me. No one had been kind to me in so, so long. When he trained me, he didn't go easy on me but he made sure I wasn't harmed. I was the only one he trained one on one, because I was the most promising. I learned that for those four hours a day, I could relax. I would be taken care of. As training went on, he became more of a person, less of a robot that wasn't sure what his own personality was supposed to be. He would tell me stories, made up fantasies that he couldn't remember learning. He made me learn how to snap a person’s neck with my legs and then he brushed my hair until I fell asleep. He told me there was a better, happier world out there; I just had to find it for myself. So I ran away. Or at least I tried.

"Призрак found me first. He realized I had left and staged his own escape to come after me. I don't know if he wanted to go with me or if he knew they would find me and he wanted to make it as easy on me as he could. The Red Room caught up with us only an hour later. He told them that he had planned the escape all along and that he took me with him without giving me the choice to stay or not. They shouted a trigger phrase at him that knocked him out. Then they took me back to the Red Room and took him away. I didn't see him again until a mission, years and years later. His target was the person I was protecting. He shot out our tires and we went straight over a cliff. When I pulled us out, he was there and when I covered my charge, he shot him. Straight through me. Like he had never known me at all." She pushes the file in front of him. "This is everything I could track down about him. Open it."

His hands don't want to work, like the muscles in his arms have turned to lead. Sweaty fingers slip on the edge of the file. On his second try, he flips it open.

Bucky's face stares up at him from a blue photo, his features in ice and closed, dead but not.

He can't breathe. His lungs are collapsing in on themselves. Stomach in his throat. Muscles clenched and trembling. " _Bucky_."

Natasha rubs a hand over his shoulder. "You have to breathe, Steve. Please, you have to calm down. I haven't told you the rest."

There was _more_? He lurches off of his seat, running for the bathroom. He falls to his knees in front of the toilet, choking on dry heaves. Bucky didn't die in the fall. Bucky is alive. Or he had been, living, tortured and forgetting everything about who he was while Steve was silenced in an icy grave. He should have looked for his body. He should have-

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." Natasha presses a cold wet rag to the back of his neck. Her voice is choked. "I've been looking for him since I figured out who he was. I know where he is, Steve."

His entire body is shuddering. Clammy skin and his pounding heart in his ears. "Tell me."

"He's in cryostasis. In an unused bunker in D.C."

He drags his sleeve across his mouth and pushes to his feet. "I need a jet. I need to get there right now."

"You can't just go in and get him, Steve. Not by yourself. You have to understand, Hydra and the Russians have had him since 1945. He's been tortured and brainwashed for sixty seven years. He won't know you. You don't know how cryostasis even works. I've been in it before. He won't even be able to walk or speak. I've read their files on him. That red book on the table? That's all of his programming codes. He won't be able to function outside of cryo unless you program him or-"

"Goddammit, Natasha, then come with me! I can't-" he chokes on his words, digging his fingernails into his palms. "I can't leave him there. Not another day longer."

"I was going to go get him with you all along, Steve. But you can't just rush in without a plan." She takes the glass from beside the sink and runs water into it, pressing it into his hand. "Rinse your mouth."

He does it, but he glares at her the whole time.

"I found out more when I was gathering his information. You won't like it. Hydra isn't dead, hasn't been for a long time. They're in SHIELD right now, not Fury but others. It's bad, Steve. And they won't take kindly to us walking in and taking their most prized Asset."

He died for nothing. Absolutely _nothing_. Bucky is still alive. Hydra is still alive. The only thing he had done was give them seventy years to destroy Bucky in every way possible. Seventy years to wreak who knew what kind of havoc on the world. It’s all his fault. "I'll deal with Hydra when I come to that bridge. But I am getting Bucky out of their hands _today_ so you better fucking have a plan and know what you're doing. JARVIS," he straightens his shoulders as he looks up at the ceiling. "Tell Tony we need a jet."


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MAJOR MAJOR SELF HARM WARNING ON THIS CHAPTER 
> 
> ok pretty much the entire fic. sorry. but this chapter especially gets into it graphically. you've been warned pls remember ur mental health is more important to me than this fic getting read. do what you need to do for YOU.

The dusty, abandoned bank is eerily silent as they descend into what should have been the safe, but is clearly not. Natasha freezes when they pass through a floor to ceiling gate, into a room that has walls lined with monitors and in the center, a chair kind of like what you would see in a dentist's office. Only so much more sinister. He wants to rip it apart with his bare hands.

Natasha clutches the red book to her chest with one hand, her chin lifted and face hard, despite how pale she is. "They would have put him in the chair directly after thawing. They never quite worked out how to make the memory erasure stay and the body heals itself during sleep. I don't think it will be enough to make him remember you immediately, but in time...maybe. He has a version of the serum, not as strong as yours but stronger than mine. And I've recovered my memories. He should too. Once I deprogram him." She taps her fingers on the cover of the book.

He can't read it; the entire thing is in Russian. But there are, at the very back, instructions for deprogramming The Asset. Bucky. It will deactivate all of his trigger words and break the connections so they’ll never work on him again. That’s the first step, Natasha said, in turning him back into a human again. Steve doesn't care, he’s still sick to his stomach. With anger and guilt and hope. Fucking hope. He still can't quite believe they’ll get to the end of these maze like tunnels in the bowels of the bank and find a tube with Bucky, frozen in time but still alive. He clenches his bandaged fist around the grip of his shield. As far as they know, they’re the only people in this building. No one guarding an inactive base. A storage building. But they’ll be prepared either way.

"This way, Steve. I can hear the cryo machine. We're close." Natasha tugs aside a fake wall that leads to a dark, narrow hallway. The humming of machinery, not unlike a refrigerator reverberates around them as they walk single file into the darkness.

It seems to go on forever, twisting and turning until it opens up into a circular room. And in the center, a large tube. Bucky's metal hand frozen to the glass.

"Oh _god_." His ears ring as he stumbles forward, dropping the shield to press both hands against the frosty window of the pod. Bucky’s hair is long, brushing his chin. And he’s shirtless, the twisted scarring around his shoulder stark. Every inch of skin is covered in ice crystals. Like cracked glass. "Natasha..."

"I'm working on it." She fiddles with a set of controls, the red book open in the crook of her elbow. "When it opens, you have to step back and let me say the deprogramming words. It has to be done immediately, while he's too unaware for his brain to fight it. It doesn't matter how he reacts, you stay out of the way and let me finish." She flips a switch and presses a button and the tube starts hissing loudly, the glass clouding over with steam.

It begins to slide open.

"Get out of the way, Steve."

He doesn’t… he can’t… but he has to. He swallows the bile making its way up his throat and steps back. His fingers twitch at his sides, clenching and unclenching. It’s not real, not until he touches him. Not until he has solid living proof.

Natasha’s speaking rapidly in Russian, reading from the book. At first she’s met with silence, but then Bucky shakes his head back and forth, shuddering like he’s in pain.

And he screams.

Steve wants to fling himself forward and rip the straps keeping Bucky in the machine off. He wants to take his friend in his arms and never let go. But Natasha is _still reading_ , practically yelling the words to be heard over him. And this has to be done. This one last thing and then dammit, he won't let anyone hurt Bucky ever again.

Natasha spits a final, guttural word and flings the book to the floor. With a nod in Steve's direction she moves to undo the buckles holding Bucky in the pod, but Steve is already there, not even aware of moving. He wedges his fingers between the leather strap and Bucky's chest, ripping it from the machine in one pull. Bucky is shaking all over, teeth chattering and eyes squeezed tightly shut. When Steve jerked away the strap pinning his hips, he falls forward, against Steve’s chest, too weak to hold himself up. His skin is sticky and he smells sterile, nothing like the cigarettes and mint that Steve had always smelled on him before but he can't care because Bucky is _here_ and _alive_ in his arms.

"Buck, Buck, Bucky," he whispers, pressing the words into Bucky’s clammy skin as he lifts him from the tube. "I've got you. You're safe now. I've got you."

Natasha has procured a scratchy blanket from somewhere and she drapes it over Bucky's shoulders, speaking in Russian, but it’s soft, different from the angry way she had been speaking the deprogramming words. She pulls an elastic band off her wrist and scrapes Bucky's gummy hair back into a makeshift ponytail at the nape of his neck.

When Bucky stops shaking enough to lift his head, his eyes are glassy, looking through Steve completely. "Кто я?"

Natasha lifts a hand, like she’s gonna rub it over Bucky’s back but she hesitates just before touching him, her brows furrowing. "Tell him who he is, Steve." She drops her arm back to her side.

He licks his lips, "Your name is Bucky Barnes. You're my best friend and you've known me your whole life."

"I don't know who you are. My head...." his eyes roll back in his skull. And he shakes. Muscles clenched and blood already dribbling down his lips.

"Lay him on the floor. On his side." Natasha jerks the blanket away, wadding it up and pressing it under Bucky's head when Steve lowers him to the ground as gently as he can. "He's seizing. It's okay, it's normal after cryo. It will stop. We just have to make sure his airways stay open and he doesn't injure himself."

This is something Steve knows, at least. Even before the war, Bucky had gotten the shakes. They hadn’t had a word for it back then, not like they did now. At least not among the destitute in DUMBO who could barely afford doctors when they were on their death beds. Epilepsy. Steve had looked it up on the internet. “He did this sometimes, when we were kids. It’s not just a cryo side effect.” His chest aches; he runs his hands lightly up and down Bucky’s arms, barely touching him. The website he had read had made it very clear that when someone is seizing, you shouldn’t hold them down like they used to in the old days. That only causes more injury. The metal arm is still freezing cold, the mutilated skin around where the prosthetic joins his shoulder a bright, angry red. He could have prevented this if not for the blind grief that drove him to needlessly put the Valkyrie in the ice. It had all been a lie. He could have easily turned the plane around and flown it back to the Hydra base it had taken off from. “We worked so hard to hide it. He was sure they would have shipped him off to an asylum in a moment if they knew.”

“There’s medicine now, to help control seizures. We’ll work it out.”

“I know.” He brushes the loose strands of hair away from Bucky’s forehead.

“Just stay with him. I’m going to go see about backing up whatever information I can get from this place. The technology is…not recent, but any info we can get is better than nothing. I’m also going to destroy that fucking chair.” She glances over her shoulder at a set of shadowy shelves. “There should be some clothes there. We can’t take him out of here half naked; he’s already going to attract too much attention as it is. The longer we can keep Hydra unaware that they’ve lost him, the better. They won’t give him up easily.” She pushes to her feet and sprints back toward the tunnel that leads to the Chair room.

Bucky’s twitching hasn’t slowed; his eyes are still rolled back, showing only the whites. There’s blood all around mouth, his tongue probably bitten. This is the easy part. Natasha had made it very clear that rehabilitation is going to be a long uphill battle where sometimes it will seem like they’re just sliding backwards and never making any progress. “I’ve got you,” he whispers. “I promise you, I’m gonna get you through this. I’ll never leave you again. I promise.”

***

Tony is waiting for them at a ‘safe house’ in the middle of a suburban neighborhood. It’s a dark red brick with a cream colored door and matching shutters. They circle the block in the dark windowed car and pull into the spacious garage from the back alley. Bucky had stopped seizing eventually, his glassy eyes shadowed with dark circles. His skin is so pale in comparison that he could easily fit in one of the Twilight movies that Clint had gleefully forced Steve to watch with him. He’d been silent as Steve had helped him dress, silent while they practically carried him from the building, silent in the car ride. Growing up, Bucky’d had a tendency to completely zone out, staring blankly and not responding to people talking to him but it hadn’t been like this. This is almost scary.

He’s physically here, sitting right next to Steve, but it’s like looking at a shell. And he knew, _he knew_ it was going to be bad like this. He knew before he ever even got on the jet that the Bucky he knew is gone and he’s got to support the man he is now as he heals. 

But Steve isn’t doing well either and a tiny part of him hadn’t believed Natasha. A tiny part of him had hope that they’d defrost Bucky and he’d be just as he was before they got on that fucking train. That he’d hug Steve and tell him everything’s gonna be alright and they’d get through it together. But it’s fine, this is fine. He can be strong for Bucky. It’s his turn to take care of him, the way Bucky always took care of him in Brooklyn. He swallows hard and reaches out, his hand trembling as he hesitantly rests it on Bucky’s shoulder. “Buck.”

Bucky cringes. It’s slight, the twitch of muscle around his eyes and hitch in his breathing almost nonexistent. Imperceptible to anyone who doesn’t know Bucky’s tells more than they know their own. But Steve _knows_ Bucky. Even after everything, as much as it hurts that _he’s_ the one that Bucky’s flinching away from, it’s a relief that this is still a constant. A piece of Bucky that’s still there, just the same as it always was. He swallows hard, pulling his hand away. “We need to go inside now, come with me. Please.”

Bucky’s gaze flickers to his but the blank expression doesn’t change. When Steve pushes his door open and stands, Bucky scoots across the backseat to exit, instead of getting out on his own side. It’s a good thing, because as soon as he attempts to stand, his knees buckle. Steve catches him with an arm around his waist. He’s bigger now; a _lot_ bigger and more muscular than he had been in the war, when they had never had enough to eat but always, always had to fight. Every single one of the commandos, spare Steve himself, had been whipcord thin and wiry, but strong. Bucky is bigger than Steve now. Again. But he’s weak from cryo and that makes it obvious how heavy the metal arm is, the entire left side of his body leaning with the weight of it.

“It’s a wonder that thing hasn’t ripped right out of his body,” Tony whistles when they round the front of the car. He’s already flipping through the files Natasha had taken from the bank, information on the mechanisms and working of the arm. Instructions for maintenance. He grimaces at one of the pages. “So we’re gonna need to get back to New York, like, ASAP. I can do some work on it here, but it’s gonna be like putting a Band-Aid on a gushing artery.” He turns on his heel and motions for them to follow him into the house. “Not only is the technology ancient- well. It’s still extremely advanced for even the mainstream prosthetics that we have nowadays, but I can do better and so that makes it ancient to me. So. Yeah, ancient and ridiculously heavy. Also it’s full of trackers and rigged to blow.”

“You’re kidding me.” Steve beelines to the dark brown couch, carefully lowering Bucky onto it and sitting heavily beside him.

Tony ignores him, sitting on the coffee table. He peers at Bucky, head tilted to the side and fingers twitching as if he’s aching to get at the arm already. “Hey there, Manchurian Candidate, how are you doing?”

“Don’t call him that.” Steve snaps.

Bucky blinks, glancing between the two of them. “Are you my handlers?”

“There are no more handlers, Bucky.” Natasha sits next to Tony. “You’re no longer a Hydra operative. This is Tony Stark, you don’t know him yet. But you know me and Steve. Even if you don’t remember us now, you will. We’re going to take care of you.”

“Yeah, what she said. Anyway, don’t worry about your two exes here for now.” Tony doesn’t seem to notice the venomous looks he receives from Nat or Steve. “I expect your arm is giving you a lot of pain, yes?”

Bucky nods. “Maintenance required for full functionality.”

“Right.” Tony clasps his hands together, pressing his index fingers against his mouth. “Ignoring the fact that my robots can have a more human conversation than that, do you mind if I uh, look under the hood, so to speak? Disable the trackers and the explode-y tech. I really like this house and would appreciate Hydra not blowing it up as soon as they get wind that we’ve liberated you.”

“You can say no, if you want.” Steve’s hand hovers, aching to touch but not sure if he should. “We just want to make sure you’re safe.”

Bucky doesn’t respond, merely extends his metal arm, no other indication of pain on his face save for the tiniest clench of his jaw.

“Jolly good! Cap, if you would be so kind as to retrieve the tool kit from the kitchen table….”

Steve forces himself up from the couch, moving toward the dimly lit kitchen. Every blind in the house is drawn, the overhead lights on low. He winces at the blood that seeps through his bandages when he curls his fingers around the handle of the toolbox. He’d really done a number on them this time, since the wounds are still opening up and bleeding when he moves them too much.

The doorbell rings. He sucks in a breath, every muscle in his body going taut and glances back at the others. Natasha is on her feet, a gun in each hand. Tony is muttering under his breath, probably obscenities. The Iron Man suit is nowhere to be seen. Bucky hasn’t reacted at all.

“Tony, answer the door.” Natasha nudges him.

“Why me?”

“You’re the only one in civilian clothes.”

“Yeah, well, I’m also more famous than anyone else is so whoever it is will recognize me faster.” Tony balks when Natasha glares at him. “Alright, alright, I’m going. You better be ready to shoot whoever it is. I didn’t plan on dying today, you know.” He pushes to his feet.

Steve angles himself so that he’s between Bucky and the door, but at an angle that he can also see. Natasha shadows Tony’s steps, placing herself so that whoever is at the door won’t notice her. Her line of fire is clear though. Tony throws his shoulders back and pulls the door open.

“Hey, I just dropped by to say welcome to the neighborhood,” the tall man standing on the stoop says with a smile. He’s got a casserole dish in the crook of his elbow, the top covered in aluminum foil. “My name’s Sam Wilson, I live next door.”

“Is that lasagna?” Tony points his finger at the food.

“Depends,” Sam cocks his head to the side. “Are you Tony Stark?”

Steve glances at Natasha, her shadowed gaze calculating as it meets his. Tony being recognized means that their security is compromised because this guy will likely go home and tell all his friends that he just met Stark. Unless they keep him quiet. Unless he’s a Hydra agent casing the place and has backup waiting. Steve clenches his jaw. Nods.

Natasha lunges, grabbing him by the collar and yanking him inside. She manages to get her arm around his throat and a gun against his temple in the blink of an eye. The casserole dish shatters on the tile floor, sending splatters of food and glass everywhere. “What the _fuck_?”

“Who the hell are you?” She snaps.

“Holy _fuck_. I said my name is Sam Wilson, I live next door.” His dark eyes are wide, darting between Tony and Steve. “You’re the Avengers. I’m being kidnapped by the Avengers.” Though he’s clearly muscled and larger than Natasha, he doesn’t attempt to fight. Smart.

“Steve, come search him.”

He glances back at Bucky, but he’s still staring at his arm blankly. Like he hasn’t even noticed the commotion. Steve swallows. _It’s gonna get worse before it will get better_. That’s what Natasha had said in the car. It may as well have been years ago that he’d walked into his kitchen and found her at his island, rather than just that morning. He moves across the room, standing in front of Sam.. He doesn’t _look_ like Hydra and he doesn’t _act_ like Hydra, but these days who could know? “The food smells good.” Steve mutters as he pats him down. It does, like cheese and tomato sauce and chicken and bacon. Delicacies that Steve still hasn’t gotten used to as staple foods.

“Thanks, man.” Sam shifts his footing, making it easier for Steve to search him. “My grandmother’s recipe. I’d say you should try some, but….” He looks mournfully at the pasta splattered floor.

Steve pulls a razor sharp knife from a sheath strapped to Sam’s ankle, underneath his jeans, and straightens, holding it up. “This is all.”

“Ex-Air Force,” Sam says. “Feel more secure carrying something.”

“Uh huh,” Natasha doesn’t release him. “Alright, neighbor man. Walk. We’re gonna restrain you in a chair until I’m sure that you aren’t part of an organization that wants us dead.” When they reach the kitchen she shoves him into one of the chairs, her gun still trained at the center of his forehead. “Tony, duct tape, if you please?”

Tony opens the tool kit, pulling out a roll and tossing it to Steve. “This would have been so much easier if you just let me act like a paranoid asshole and slam the door in his face, Nat.”

“Because that’s not suspicious at all. Like you said, you’re famous. First thing this guy would have done was tell all his friends that Tony Stark just moved in next door and then they’d have all been on the lawn. Best case scenario, he really is just a guy who lives next door. We make him sign a NDA under threat of death if it’s breached. Worst case, he’s the bait that Hydra sent and they have the house surrounded.”

“I would like to say something,” Sam still isn’t resisting even as Steve winds the duct tape around his body, securing him in the chair.

“Too bad. I talk, you listen.” Natasha crouches in front of him, dangling the gun between her fingers. “Who do you work for?”

“The V.A. I run a group therapy program.”

“I hate therapists,” Steve groans.

“Sounds like you need more therapy,” Sam raises an eyebrow at him. His gaze drops to the bloodied bandages. “A lot more.”

“I was in a fight.”

“Bullshit.” Tony coughs loudly, his hands flying up, placating, when Steve scowls at him. “I mean…of course you were in a fight. It’s what you do. I’m just gonna...go see about disabling those things that need to be disabled. You can interrogate this guy.” He grabs the tool kit and edges around the short wall that separates the kitchen from the living room.

Steve glances at Natasha. She’s moved to sit in another one of the chairs at the table, a laptop open in front of her. Her gun rests next to it. “Go to him. I’ve got this.”

He drops Sam’s knife next to her gun and doesn’t even bother walking around the wall. It’s easy to vault and he settles beside Bucky as Tony pulls a shining screwdriver out. There’s a sort of tablet on his knee, but instead of a screen, it emits a blue holographic copy of Bucky’s arm. Tony hums and taps the screwdriver against the palm of his hand a few times.

“Alright, I think if I wedge this under…this panel,” The metal sheet pops off the arm smoothly, clattering to the floor. Beneath it is a mess of wires, encased in some kind of cloudy green gel. “That’s disgusting.”

“Cooling.” Bucky’s voice is raspy, words stilted. It makes Steve’s heart trip in his chest. “The first one. Burned.”

“You remember getting your arm?” He hates the way his hands shake so he shoves them under his thighs. Keeping himself from reaching out and touching. If Bucky remembers the arm then maybe….

Bucky’s brows furrow. “Tactical memory for maximum field efficiency.”

“Great, well. I’m gonna set you up with something better. Eventually. For right now,” Tony presses the screwdriver into the slime, his eyes glued to the holograph. After some wiggling, a metal capsule pops loose and he grimaces as he grips it with two fingers and sets it on the coffee table. “That’ll be the remote activated drug injector.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“Oh, you know,” Tony glances up at him, drawing circles in the air with the gooey screwdriver. “Your typical mind clouding shit, not that different from date rape stuff, but way stronger because super solider. File said it was programmed to dose him every six hours so that’s probably why he’s so unresponsive right now. It would have shot him up with them as soon as he thawed.”

“Guys, what the fuck?” Sam calls. “You know you aren’t actually in another room and I can still hear this disturbing shit you’re saying.”

“I hope his background check comes back clean. We might need a therapist on hand when Barnes starts becoming more aware of his surroundings. God knows none of us are even remotely capable of talking about feelings.” Tony mutters, barely loud enough for Steve to hear. He swaps out the screwdriver for a tiny pair of wire cutters. “Going for the trackers now.”

“You can’t just kidnap the guy and force him to be a therapist outside his job,” Steve hisses. He feels pretty good about trusting his gut. It’s never led him wrong- maybe into a few strictly unnecessary fights but there was always a good reason for them. And his gut is saying that Sam Wilson is just a polite guy with good intentions that knocked on the wrong door at the wrong time. 

“We get it, you hate therapy.”

“That’s not the issue here.” His temples are throbbing, his headache building and building and building as he watches Tony fiddle around in the arm. It’s hard to process, that his best friend is sitting right beside him, a shell of a person that doesn’t even know him. Bucky may never know him again. His chest heaves with the effort of sucking breath into his lungs. “I have to…be right back.” He stumbles to his feet, his hurried strides taking him up the carpeted stairs in record time. The hallway is wide, he knows it logically, but it feels like it’s closing in on him. The first door he shoves open is another set of stairs to an attic. The second is a bedroom. He all but slams the door shut behind him and collapses on the bare mattress, his skin prickling all over, like hundreds of tiny needles pressing into him. He tears the bandages away from his hands, shuddering as he flexes them. They’re trying to heal; the skin is _trying_ to knit itself back together. He doesn’t want it to. 

He… he needs… Fuck, he can’t just punch a wall, he’d bust right through it. Property damage isn’t something else he wants to owe Tony for. He swallows hard. It’s his fault Bucky is like this. If he’d only looked for his body… he could have saved them. The ceiling is bright white, his vision blurring as he stares at it. The entire house is alarmingly white for a safe house. You’d think the decorations would be something that wouldn’t show blood stains as easily.

He takes a deep breath and presses two fingers into the healing wound on his left hand. Ignores the burning, the agony, and pulls until the skin tears under the pressure of his nails. Pulls it open and stares at the blood. At the peek of white bone. It’s sickening. His mother would hate him for this. Bucky would hate him for this. But he’s losing his mind and all he knows is pain. It’s the only thing he can control.

Someone knocks on the door.

He flinches and jerks his hand away from the wound, grabbing the ruined gauze he’d ripped off his injuries earlier and pressing it against the fresh flow of blood just as the door eases open. The guy, Sam, steps through. Natasha is right behind him, scowling, but she doesn’t have her gun pointed at him. “He’s who he says he is. He was military, but he’s a psychologist now. Talk to him. Not too much information but you know…I’ll be outside.” She glares at Sam. “You harm him in any way and I’ll cut your fingers off one by one and feed them to you.”

Sam nods, eyes wide. When she shuts the door, he turns back to Steve, his arms too loose at his sides. A pose meant to put him at ease. “Hey, man. I’m gonna be honest, I’m confused as hell right now. But you seem like you’re going through a lot. Do you want to talk about it?”

“I’m fine.” Steve bites down on his lower lip, his entire hand on fire from the pressure he’s putting on it. The one he didn’t mutilate honestly isn’t feeling that much better. “They shouldn’t have made you come up here. I have a therapist in New York.”

“You were clearly having a panic attack when you ran off.” He leans one shoulder against the wall, his gaze dropping to the injuries, intense. “Look, even if I wasn’t under threat of death right now, I would have wanted to check up on you anyway. It’s not a therapist thing, it’s a concerned fellow soldier thing. I won’t reveal anything you might say to anyone. I keep my own share of classified intel from my time in the service. And you’re not the first vet I’ve known with PTSD and guilt issues. Hell, I have them too. Whatever you might or might not want to share, this is a safe space.”

“What’s PTSD?” It sounds familiar, like maybe something he had seen on one of the pamphlets that SHIELD had given him when he woke up, but he had barely skimmed those. They had set up a series of conditioning meetings where they were supposed to help him work through things and adjust to the future but then the whole thing with the Tesseract had happened and. Well. They never quite made it to fruition.

“What’s PT-” Sam gapes at him. He strides over to the desk, grabbing the chair and flipping it backwards so he can straddle it, facing Steve. “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Seen in veterans and trauma survivors; abused children and people who have been in car accidents or other life threatening situations for example. They called it shellshock back in your day, I think.”

The thousand yard stare. Bucky had developed it after Azzano. Steve had frequently found him gazing off into nothingness, his shoulders a tense line, his knuckles white from gripping his gun. And while Bucky’s staring spells had been nothing new, the way he’d silently screamed himself awake night after night for the entire two years they were fighting together had been. “I never got that,” Steve pulls the gauze back, wincing when the wet material sticks to the muscle tissue. The bleeding seems to have stopped, though. “I saw…friends with it. But I never….”

“I don’t think you’ve been out of war long enough to recognize if you do or not, Steve.” Sam’s brows furrow. “Can I call you Steve?”

“Sure.”

“There’s more to PTSD than what they thought. Irrational anger, anxiety, depression. They’re all indicators. And so many more things than that,” he cuts his gaze to the ragged wounds on Steve’s hands. “Look, I’m not your therapist. I’m just _a_ therapist. I can recognize when people are in pain though. I’m not sure what’s going on with your friend downstairs, the one that you were talking about being drugged, but from what I did pick up, that alone is enough to cause the best of us to panic.”

They both jump when the door slams open. Natasha glances between them before snapping, “Look alive, fellas. We have to get out of here now. Tony barely finished disabling the bomb when it was remotely activated. Hydra knows someone has him and they’re willing to dispose of him to keep him out of our hands. You too,” she points at Sam, “we’re not done with you yet. We’ll get you a transport back here once you sign NDAs but in the meantime I hope you like New York City.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im kind of ehh abt how i brought sam into this fic but i love him and i couldn't leave him out and i couldn't come up with any other feasible way to get them to meet and keep this plot. 
> 
> also this is the last prewritten chapter i had ready so i may slow down updates from here on out idk it depends bc we're hella busy sorting through all my nanas stuff that we inherited so idk when i'll have solid writing time idkkkk im just vibing ok here bye please leave comments because they singlehandedly keep my crippling depression at bay i survive on them and them alone at this point ilyyyyyyy


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hate this.

Sam is an inhumanly good person, Steve decides about ten minutes into the flight to New York after their rapid departure from the safe house. For all intents and purposes, they've kidnapped him, held a gun to his head, and thrown him into a mission he knows nothing about except that Hydra is after them. But he's taken the whole thing in stride, settling in a seat near Steve and Bucky, keeping up a steady stream of chatter about pointless things even though Bucky is still all but comatose for how responsive he's been and Steve is almost vibrating with the need to get up and _do something_. He doesn't like planes. Sam takes that in stride too.

And he silently pulls the first aid kit out from under the seat and helps Steve wrap his destroyed hands in bandages again.

Must be a therapist thing.

“Tell me about your favorite movie,” Sam says.

“Snow White.” He and Bucky had seen it in theater. They had maybe seen it in theater seven times, not because they had the money but because they kept sneaking into showings. It had been Steve’s idea and it had gotten them banned from that theater when they inevitably got caught but he just hadn’t been able to help himself. It had been so beautiful and so groundbreaking for its time. Now it was old and the colors were duller, the art not to the caliber of the likes of Tangled but. He still loved it. “Came out in ’38. First full color animated movie. I was an artist before… everything. Went to art school like the real deal.” Well. Before he’d had to drop out. “Snow White was something that gave me hope that I might actually be able to make a nice living from art if I could get into that market.”

It sure would have been a hell of a lot better than drawing dirty magazines, but a paycheck is a paycheck.

“That’s awesome! Have you seen any Studio Ghibli films yet? The animation style is really something.”

“I haven’t.” Steve hisses as Sam presses the medicated gauze pad over his knuckles and starts winding a strip of gauze around his palm and the back of his hand. “Which one should I watch?

“ _All_ of them, but you gotta start with Spirited Away.” Sam tapes the bandage closed and sits back, gathering up the discarded wrappers and bloodied alcohol wipes and peeling the latex gloves off his hand so that the contaminated stuff is inside them, dropping the entire mess in a plastic zip close bag. “I’ll give you a list.”

“Thanks,” Steve rubs the back of his neck, looking over at Bucky. He’s cradling his left arm against his sternum, blinking blearily at the floor. “I’m just gonna….” he trails off, nodding toward Bucky.

“Yeah, of course,” Sam pats him on the shoulder and goes back to his seat. 

He doesn’t know what he can possibly do to make Bucky feel any better, any more alive. Tony and Natasha are both occupied in the cockpit so he can’t ask them for advice- not that he really thinks Tony would have anything helpful to say that isn’t related to mechanics, but Natasha might. Something… anything. He sighs, looking around the plane. There’s a box of protein bars on one of the overhead shelves. Maybe Bucky is hungry. Steve burns a ridiculous amount of calories even when he’s doing nothing and thawing from cryofreeze and seizing probably took a huge toll on Bucky. The least he can do is offer him something to eat.

Grabbing a handful of bars from the box, he walks over and crouches in front of Bucky so they’re eye to eye. “Hey, Buck.” Bucky doesn’t say anything but his gaze lifts to meet Steve’s. Small victories. He takes a deep breath. “I… I thought you might be hungry. I don’t have much to offer right now but I found these,” he holds the bars out, “if you want them.”

Bucky furrows his brows, looking down at the food and back up at Steve. It’s the most expression he’s shown since he flinched away from Steve’s touch in the car. “I don’t… what do I do with that?”

He might be sick. “Bucky… they’re for you to eat.” Nothing. “Um, nutrition. Caloric intake?”

If he can call the blank, acquiescing expression clear, he’d say Bucky’s expression clears at that clarification, but it’s so chilling he doesn’t know if it’s the right word. “Tactical memory indicates intravenous nutrition before missions.” 

Oh god… oh god, he’s definitely going to be sick. Intravenous nutrition. Bucky _doesn’t remember what eating is_. He blinks hard, swallows against the burning lump in his throat. “There’s no mission, Buck. I’m taking you _home_. You don’t have to go on any more missions.”

Bucky blinks at him. 

Steve almost reaches out, almost grabs his hand. But he doesn’t. Bucky had shown clearly enough in the car that he doesn’t like to be touched. He would _let_ Steve, if he tried, because he’s so out of it from the drugs and the cryo and the brainwashing but that’s not how he wants to touch him. He wants to hug Bucky, wants to comfort him. But only if Bucky wants it too. He swallows hard, setting the protein bars on the bench beside Bucky. “Um… we don’t _have_ intravenous nutrition so…. these are for you. If you want them. It’s okay to eat.” His voice is barely more than a whisper. “Please eat.”

Not that Bucky probably needs gross calorie bars in his state, but it’s the best that Steve can offer right now. When they get back to the tower he can make chicken soup, the way first his mother and then Bucky used to make it for him when he was at his sickest. He’s not the best at baking, but he can try to recreate the dense salt bread that he’d grown up on. Bucky needs comfort food. 

Hell, after everything, Steve needs comfort food too. 

The flight is short, not even an hour with the speed of Tony’s jet, but it passes like fucking years. He doesn’t know what to do, anxiously watching Bucky, who doesn’t touch the protein bars. Sam occasionally tries to engage him in conversation, but Steve really isn’t in any state of mind to talk. The only reason he isn’t wringing his hands like an old grandmother is because of the bandages. He really should let the wounds heal this time. 

They land on the roof of the tower and Steve grips the edge of his seat hard enough that it dents under the pressure of his fingers as the plane jostles with the landing. He takes a deep breath and stands as Natasha emerges from the cockpit. They both look at Bucky- who got to his feet unsteadily when the jet had landed and is now standing at attention even though he’s clearly weak, his entire body listing to the left- and then back at each other. Steve, as much as he wants to snatch Bucky away, bundle him up in blankets and hide him away from the world forever, doesn’t want to block Natasha out of the healing process. Bucky meant something to her, too. A parent to her when she had no one else to care about her aside from her killing potential. They’re in this together. “Go ahead,” he tells her, softly.

She shoots him a tight smile and steps toward Bucky, telegraphing her movements as she reaches out, helping him support his arm and murmuring softly in Russian. Bucky seems more at ease with her- he doesn’t cringe away when she tucks his limp hair behind his ears, seems more attentive to her quiet words than he had to Steve’s. It hurts, deep in his chest, but if Natasha is what Bucky needs to feel safe instead of Steve, he has to give him that. Steve’s emotions don’t matter here. He’s the reason Bucky is like this in the first place. All he had to do was reach farther, hold him tighter, and this wouldn’t have happened. So he swallows hard and shoves his hands in the pockets of his tactical pants and carefully fixes his gaze on the floor of the plane. 

The bay door opens up, revealing Bruce and Pepper waiting for them. “It’s my two favorite people!” Tony announces, sauntering out of the cockpit. He claps Sam on the shoulder as he passes him, “Pepper is gonna get you sorted out with the NDAs and get you compensated for your trouble, pal. Think you can write down that lasagna recipe for my kitchen staff before you go home, though? It did smell _really_ good.”

“Yeah, no problem.” Sam waves him off, looking over at Steve with his forehead wrinkled in concern. “You good, man?”

Steve pinches his thigh hard inside the pocket of his pants, the flare of pain clearing his head enough to meet Sam’s gaze, fake a smile, and say, “I’m fine.” He is. He has Bucky back. That’s… it’ll be enough. Once everything gets out of Bucky’s system he’ll remember Steve like Natasha said he will and everything will go back to normal. Sure, they’re in the future now but they’ll still be _buckyandsteve_. They’ll be fine. 

He knows it’s a lie. 

Sam purses his lips and sighs, shaking his head. “Okay, look,” he grabs a pad of paper and a pen sitting on a shelf, scribbling something on it before ripping the paper off and pressing it into Steve’s hand. “You seem like you need a friend. If you ever need to talk, you can call me.”

“I have a therapist already,” Steve frowns.

“Good news for you then. I only offer therapy if I’m getting paid for it and I never see my friends as clients anyway. I mean it. Friends, if you want to be. It’s up to you.” He claps Steve’s shoulder, smiling, and then turns and exits the jet to meet Pepper with a firm handshake.

Steve shoves the paper in his pocket without looking at it, looking back to Natasha and Bucky. They’ve been joined by Tony and Bruce, who are both comparing the arm to the holographic model and muttering about neurolinks or something. “What are you doing?” He wanders closer, swallowing hard and trying to smile when Bucky looks blearily at him.

“You’re his last listed next of kin, right, Rogers?” 

“...Yes. Why?”

“Let’s move this inside,” Bruce suggests, taking the tablet from Tony and turning it off. “I prepped one of the med bays already. We can get a neural scan going and talk options.”

“What kind of options?” He steps closer to Bucky, not in his personal space, but as close as his heart will let him get. As close as he can without Bucky flinching away from him. He barely even acknowledges Steve’s presence, a disinterested, _dismissing_ flicker of his gaze before he turns his attention back on Natasha, nodding as she speaks quietly. When she starts to walk out of the jet, he follows her closely.

Nobody answers Steve’s question, at least not until they’re in the building and in the elevator headed for the med lab. “Here’s the thing.” Tony finally meets Steve’s gaze. “Your boyfriend over here is drugged out of his mind right now. And even if he wasn’t, I’m pretty sure he’s still incapacitated enough to not be able to make decisions for himself right now. That means it falls to you to approve any medical procedures. I managed to get rid of the trackers and explosives and the drug capsule back at the house- those were our most pressing issues.”

“ _What. Options?_ ” He wants to say _he’s not my boyfriend_ , but it’s Tony. Steve knows him well enough by now that the nicknames are purposely chosen to strike nerves. So he ignores it, edges closer to Bucky, who is standing in one corner, rigid except for the way his body shakes, wavers. Whatever toll being on ice takes on the body, Steve had slept through this stage of it. When he’d woken, he’d been physically as strong as ever.

But he hadn’t been drugged and he didn’t have seizures and he didn’t have a mechanical arm too heavy for his body, so what did he know? God, he’s so fucking… he’s so fucking selfish. He can’t compare what he went through to what Bucky has gone through. Steve hasn’t gone through _anything_ in comparison. 

He counts his breaths, steady in and out, the way Bucky used to count for him when he had an asthma attack. He counts them so he doesn’t reach out and hug the man he thought was dead. So that he doesn’t cry- the time for that is past. If he was going to cry over his life, he should have done it before the plane or before this. Now it’s his turn to be strong for Bucky.

It’s not okay to cry.

The elevator doors open up, out into a medical suite cleared of all staff. Tony steps out, walking backwards to level a steady look at Steve. “Why don’t you let us figure out exactly what we’re working with first? But my best guess? The arm’s gotta come off. If for no other reason, it’s way too heavy for his body. Even with the serum taken into account.” He pushes open a frosted glass door and hums approvingly. 

The room smells like a fruity air freshener. It’s all white and shining chrome, but the lighting is ambient, not harsh fluorescent like the buzzing lightbulbs in the SHIELD medical facility they’d sent him to after he’d woken up. One of the perks and downfalls of the serum is the sensitivity to sound. It was good that he could hear Hydra from what seemed like a mile away during the war. But the future is so _loud_ , there’s so much electricity everywhere and he can hear it, humming in his eardrums like an ever present mosquito. The first few weeks out of the ice, it had made him nauseous all the time, dizzy for no reason other than just how _loud_ everything is. He’s started getting used to it, at least. It’ll always be there, but he can tune it out. Somewhat.

“Hey, Buddy. Bucky-Boy. Hop up on my table here, will you.” The table in indication is one of those awful cots, covered in paper sheeting for sanitation. Steve had sat on one for _days_ after they brought him out of the ice. While they ran test after test on him, took his blood and cells and plasma for study purposes. He hates those tables. But Bucky carefully sits on the edge of it, his spine ramrod straight. Tony perches on a wheely stool and positions himself in reach of Bucky’s arm. “So, I’m no medical doctor, but I do know mechanics. I’m gonna ask you some questions about your arm and you answer them if you can, okay? Then we’re gonna get an X-ray and see about a- Bruce, we doing a MRI?”

Bruce snorts, not looking up from the laptop he’s produced from somewhere. “With that arm? Not likely. _Magnetic_ resonance image.”

“CT scan then. I don’t know. I’m just here for the arm. These are mostly yes or no questions. If you can provide details, great. If not, don’t worry about it. You with me so far?”

“Yes.” Bucky is watching Stark, his expression still glazed, drugged, but responsive. 

“Great. Can you feel this?” Tony drums his fingers on the plating of Bucky’s arm.

“Yes.”

“ _Caaaan_ you control pressure in your grip?”

“Yes.”

“Is your arm anchored to your skeleton?”

“The….” Bucky’s brow furrows and his right hand shakes as he lifts it. He touches his collarbone. “The arm. Steel screws in bone. Clavicle. Scapula.”

 _The_ arm. Not _his_ arm. Steve closes his eyes, breathes out slow. Bucky had been a possessive son of a bitch his whole life. Now he doesn’t even refer to the arm on his body as his own. 

“Cool, cool,” Tony says, high pitched, “Thank you for detailing. We’ll see what shows up in the X-rays but this is good. Great job. Do you know what powers your arm?”

Bucky’s expression shutters, eyes dull. He shakes his head. 

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll figure it out.” Tony rolls his stool back, getting to his feet. “J, status on finding a neurologist?”

“Still checking clearance levels, Sir.”

Neurologist. Steve stiffens. He knows what that is. When he’d done his research into epilepsy, he’d learned about them. Brain surgeons. That had been Bucky’s worst fear. That someone would catch him in a fit of the shakes and they’d cart him off to an asylum and drill into his brain to ‘fix’ him. Everyone knew the stories about those places and those procedures. Half the time, lobotomies weren’t survived and if they were, the person was never the same again. They’d put him in a strait jacket and lock him up in a padded cell somewhere and never let him out again. He’d been so afraid of that. What Hydra had done to him was worse, but Steve still isn’t going to let them… let them just….

He snags Tony’s sleeve, dragging him out into the hallway before anyone can say anything. “Why do you need a neurologist?”

Tony raises his brows, unimpressed. “You heard him. He’s got sensation in that thing. I had my suspicions when I was working on it before, but it’s wired right into his nervous system, Steve. Not only that, it’s _screwed_ into his skeleton. Even if his bone density is on par with yours, the weight of it is still… definitely causing unnecessary injuries. I bet you right now when we get a look at his X-rays, he’ll have fractures around all of those screws. And we don’t know what else Hydra did to him. We need a real MD, here. I have knowledge, Bruce has _more_ knowledge, mostly theoretical, but he does have some practical experience. Neither of us is equipped to handle this though.”

“I don’t want you messing with his brain. He’s been through enough. No brain surgery.”

“We shouldn’t have to go that far, unless Hydra’s done way more than we realize. But wait until we get a few brain scans and get a brain doctor to look at them? What if they have some kind of implant in his brain and we don’t even know it? It might be necessary.”

Steve rubs his shaking hands over his face, the gauze catching against his chapped lips. He hasn’t had anything to drink all day, aside from when he’d rinsed his mouth after throwing up when he’d learned the truth. Fuck, no way was that less than twelve hours ago, it… it.

Why the _fuck_ is he out here, talking, away from Bucky when a few hours ago he thought he was _dead_?

He sucks in a harsh breath through his teeth, turning on his heel so sharply the floor squeaks under the sole of his boot, and stumbles back through the door. Bucky is here. He’s _here_. He’s sitting on the table, while Bruce operates the portable X-ray machine, and his gaze meets Steve’s when he enters the room again.

It’s torture, waiting against the wall with Nat for Bruce to finish, for him to wheel the bulky apparatus away, but when he finally does, when Steve finally crosses the room to stand before his friend, he stops just short of touching him. He wants to. He _wants to_. “How are you doing?” He asks instead, soft. “We can stop at any time, if you want to.”

“Maintenance required for maximum field efficiency.” Bucky says. Repeats from earlier. 

“Can I touch your hand?”

The metal arm whirrs, hums with something- not electricity- as he extends it toward Steve.

“Your other hand. It’s okay to say no.”

Bucky nods.

Steve takes a deep breath, reaches for his right hand, squeezes it gently. “I- I know you don’t know me. But I want you to know that even if you never do remember me, I’m not going to let anyone hurt you ever again.”

Once the X-rays are processed, things move very fast. Tony was right when he speculated about fractures around the screws anchoring Bucky’s arm to his skeleton. At first, Steve doesn’t really know what he’s looking at when Jarvis projects the images into the air, but Natasha points out where each screw is, the hairline cracks radiating out from them, and the scarring from repeat injuries. Whatever drug that had been in the capsule in the arm burns out of Bucky’s system too. Tony had said that it had been programmed to dose him every six hours. It’s not really a gradual decline either. One moment he’s sitting on the examination table, docile. And then Bruce and Tony bring out a portable CT scanner and he’s on his feet and across the room, wedging himself into a corner. Wild, terrified eyes dart around the room.

“Sergeant Barnes’ vitals are dangerously elevated.” Jarvis announces.

“Put it _away_ ,” Steve barely spares a glance at Tony and Bruce. He slowly, _slowly_ crosses the room to Bucky, waving Natasha down when she starts to move closer too. While Bucky _had_ seemed more comfortable with her, Steve needs to be the one here for him now. And if he snaps and lashes out, then Steve’s the one who will come through it with the least damage. There’s a sheen of sweat all over Bucky’s face and his hands are clenching and unclenching as he watches Steve approach. “Bucky,” he speaks softly. “Hey, Buck. I meant what I said. We’re not going to hurt you. They’re putting it away.”

“I don’t know who you are,” Bucky bursts out and then flinches away, like he expects Steve to slap him for speaking.

And it occurs to him. In the bunker, he had told Bucky who _he_ was. But it hadn’t occurred to him to introduce himself. Not even once. Even though he knew Bucky didn’t remember him. He didn’t even think about it. “I-” he swallows hard, forces himself to keep his hands loose and not clench them into fists. “I’m sorry. My name is Steve Rogers.”

_You called me Stevie sometimes._

_We grew up together._

_There were times when I thought we could be more_.

He doesn’t say any of those things. What he _does_ is brush his bangs away from his forehead, sink down to sit cross legged on the freezing tile floor at Bucky’s feet so he’s looking up at him. What he does is say, “I know you can take care of yourself. But you don’t have to. I’m with you until the end of the line.”

Bucky’s eyes widen, his lips parting in a whoosh of breath. When his knees give out from under him and he slides down the wall to sit, Steve offers him a shaky smile.Bucky is staring at him in something like horror, something like confusion, his brow wrinkled. He doesn’t speak, but he doesn’t look away either. Not when Tony and Bruce and Nat start arguing in the background, not when Jarvis says something about his vitals. 

Not when Steve slowly reaches out and puts his hands palm up on the floor between them. “Can I touch you?”

Bucky’s hand shakes when he places it on top of Steve’s. “I don’t know who you are,” he says again, softly.

“But….” 

“I know those words.”

Steve squeezes Bucky’s hand in both of his, swallowing hard. It’s progress already. He’s speaking like a person, not a machine, and even if he doesn’t remember yet, he will. If the words are already familiar, he will. “Let me help you.” He pleads. “I swear no one will ever take another memory from you again.”

“They want to take the arm.” He’s hushed, gaze skittering over to Bruce and Tony, somewhere behind Steve.

“We’re gonna give you another one; one that won’t hurt you anymore.” He really hopes it’s not a lie. Tony had said he could make a better prosthetic so hopefully… “We need to get a scan of your brain first though. So we can know if Hydra did anything else that we need to know about before we try to replace this arm. All it’s going to do is take a picture. We won’t hurt you.”

“Okay.”

***

They didn’t exactly start the day expecting to liberate a prisoner of war and even though everyone else disapproves the idea, Steve refuses to leave him in the med lab overnight. He’s exhausted, Bucky’s exhausted. The only option here is to bring him back to Steve’s apartment. 

“He might attack you,” Natasha hisses under her breath, grabbing his elbow.

“He’s dead on his feet, Nat.” Steve frowns at her. Bucky’s eyes are bloodshot, dark circles underneath them. He’s pale and slumped in his seat. “If he doesn’t get to lay down soon, he’ll fall asleep where he’s sitting. I _know_ him.”

“You think you do.”

Steve ignores her and gently urges Bucky to his feet, one hand at his waist to guide him toward the elevators. He’s staggering on his feet, sweaty like he’s been running a marathon. Steve wants to scoop him up and carry him fucking bridal style, but he doesn’t want to alarm him. They let him go without a fuss but he knows that Jarvis will be monitoring them. It had bothered him, when he’d moved into the tower, knowing the AI was watching and listening to his every move. But he didn’t have anything to hide really. His issue with destroying the shit out of his hands in the gym was forbidden but public knowledge among the team. And when he wasn’t fighting or training, he’d mostly spent every day either curled up in a ball at the foot of his bed wishing he could just stop existing or sitting out on the balcony chain smoking Bucky’s favorite brand of cigarettes in the hope of feeling closer to him. Some days he was fine, some days he felt absolutely nothing at all. And some days he had struggled to even _breathe_ , crushed under the weight of living when he had no one and nothing to live _for_.

He watches Bucky in the elevator, down fourteen floors to his apartment, watches him like if he blinks he’ll never get the chance to lay eyes on him again. He looks… not so much physically older than he did in the war, but there’s a tiredness to his features that belies the decades he’s lived under the reign of Hydra. He needs a shower and a haircut, needs a good square meal. But he doubts they’ll get any of those tonight, not with the way his eyes are barely staying open. Steve’s had to adjust his hold on Bucky’s waist, nearly holding him up. “Buck, hey, stay awake for just a few more minutes. Just until we can get you to bed.”

Bucky sucks in a breath, his heavy gaze lifting to Steve’s. There’s a line between his pinched brows, his skin almost grey.

“Hey,” he taps his fingers gently against the small of Bucky’s back. “How’re you feeling?”

“Headache,” Bucky mumbles, shaking his head slightly. 

It’s not surprising. He’d been through so much today- defrosting, seizing, the stress alone- and drug withdrawal would probably kick in too. If not now, then soon. “We’re gonna help you feel better.” He feels like a broken record, repeating that over and over so many times but what else can he say? The elevator comes to a halt and the doors slide open into the foyer of Steve’s apartment. He hates the way the elevator just opens right into his space but he won’t complain, not when he’s been given so much already. “C’mon. There’s a soft bed and a warm blanket waiting for you.”

The bed is still unmade from the morning, when he had stumbled out from under the thick comforter, his hands aching too badly to put them through the stress of straightening the blankets. His mother would have scolded him something awful for that one- _even if you can’t do anything else, Steven, you make your bed and you wash your dishes._ She’d be so disappointed in the thing he’s become. He waits until Bucky has sat on the edge of the mattress before he turns away to look through one of his dresser drawers for a pair of socks. “You might not remember it yet, but you always had to sleep in socks. As a general rule, before the serum, I was the one who ran cold but your feet were always _freezing_ even when the rest of you was warm.” He finds the pair he was looking for- sunflower yellow and soft, fuzzy and warm, but when he turns back around with them clutched in his hand, Bucky is already asleep. He’s curled up in fetal position on his right side. The lamplight is glinting off the silver of his arm, wrapped around his knees. 

Steve swallows, dropping the socks and stepping closer. He keeps his footsteps light, making no noise. He doesn’t want to disturb him if he can help it. But he can’t stop the way he reaches out, brushes Bucky’s gummy hair away from his face. He doesn’t even stir. Even in sleep, he looks _exhausted_ his face drawn with pain. Steve pulls the comforter over him, sitting next to him and running his shaking fingers gently through Bucky’s hair, over and over again.

He sits there for a long time, just trying to process the day. Until Jarvis quietly tells him that the kitchen staff will be delivering dinner for him momentarily and Sergeant Barnes is in REM sleep. It’s hard to tear himself away, but he does, going out into the living area just as the elevator opens and someone from the kitchen steps out. He accepts the food with his thanks and takes it and his pack of Lucky Strikes out to the balcony. He eats first, half a dozen chicken enchiladas. And then he smokes the entire pack. When the last cigarette burns so low it singes his fingers and his lips, he does not flinch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> like i genuinely had no clue where i was going with this chapter or what to do with it and my life has been so topsy turvy with everything going on that i don't have the energy to do anything else with it and i hate it so i released it a day early so i never have to think about it again because i hate it very much ok dont bully me i tried and i failed but at least i tried ok bye anastasia out


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> general warning for suicidal thoughts on this chapter.
> 
> sorry for the delay in updating i was ill :(

Bucky does not remember. Not for the next two weeks, not when Tony brings in a brain specialist to explain the effects of the Chair. Not when they take off his arm and replace it with one that’s an appropriate weight, that works even better than the Hydra arm. What he does is latch onto Steve like… _like a baby duck_ , Tony had snickered. Steve doesn’t mind. He doesn’t want to leave Bucky’s side either. It all feels a little too false, like he’s standing on ice just waiting for it to crack under his feet and send him plummeting.

He sits with Bucky through the bouts of shaking, vomiting, seizing drug withdrawal. Bucky has a lot more seizures now than he used to- or at least it feels like he does when Jarvis is able to detect and announce them when they start. Half the time, Steve wouldn’t have even noticed them, because they’re so short. Moments of Bucky just checking out for seconds at a time. He’d asked Bucky once, a long time ago, what it felt like. They’d been sitting in the quiet, candlelit darkness of their living room. Bucky had been curled up on one end of the ragged couch, quilt around his shoulders, his face pale and pinched after hours where he stared.

And stared.

And stared.

“Like I’m far away,” he’d answered, curling in tighter on himself, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “Like my head is so quiet, so foggy. And I’m so far away. And I’m stuck there.”

Steve hadn’t understood it at the time. He can see it now. 

When Bucky is awake, he’s either out of it completely from the withdrawal and the seizures or he’s silently following Steve around like a shadow. He doesn’t _mind_ , but he does wish that Bucky would _talk_. Even if it’s nothing, even if it’s just a hum of indication that he’s listening when Steve talks. But he’s so _silent_. Far away. So Steve talks. He talks about growing up together, hoping it’ll encourage some kind of trigger for his memories. The neurologist had suggested it.

But for the most part, Bucky sleeps. He’s awake maybe four hours a day, only long enough to use the bathroom, inhale whatever food Steve has available to offer him, maybe shower, and see the doctor. Then he crashes again, curling up in Steve’s bed under as many blankets as possible. Steve’s taken to sleeping in the armchair in his room, even though there’s a couch in the living room, even though there’s a spare room that had mysteriously had furniture appear in it in the time while Steve and Bucky were on the medical floor for his arm replacement. Bucky has nightmares, awful screaming fits that Steve will never be able to unhear. 

They’ve started featuring in his own nightmares.

He’s not sleeping well, all things considered.

Steve is in the kitchen, fumbling his way through a recipe for pasta, when Natasha shows up. He doesn’t hear her come in, startling so badly when he turns around and sees her perched on the marble countertop that he nearly drops the package of chicken thighs he’s holding. “Hi?”

“How’s Bucky?” She asks by way of greeting. She comes by every day to ask, to spend a little time with him if he’s awake, even though he’s taken to not acknowledging her presence at all.

“Sleeping.” They probably have about an hour left before he either wakes up naturally or screams himself awake. Steve removes the covering on the chicken and starts laying them out on the white plastic cutting board. He’s got a wicked sharp knife for slicing the meat into bite sized pieces before he puts it in the marinade. “If you want to stick around and eat, he should be up soon.”

“I wish I could but,” she hops down from the counter, pulling something from her pocket. “I’m heading to Croatia tonight. We got a tip there’s an active Hydra cell. Gonna see what information I can drum up before Fury sends in the cavalry.”

It’s been a fucking mess, trying to get a jump on wiping out Hydra while keeping them unaware that it’s the Avengers and by association the _real_ SHIELD that’s found them out. Right now, the only people outside of Steve, Nat, Tony, and Bruce to know the full truth of Bucky and who he really is, is Fury. And they’d only told him because of the Hydra mess. Steve would be more than happy to tear through any Hydra base with extreme prejudice- he’s got enough rage simmering under his skin right now he could probably destroy them single-handedly- but his place right now is here. Bucky needs him here. And that’s more important than fighting. So he’s standing down, letting the team pick up the missions for the time being. “Be safe,” he tells her. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

She smirks. “Before I go, I have something for you.”

“Hold on.” He sets down his knife, turning to the sink to wash the raw meat off his hands. Not that the germs could hurt him, but it’s the principle of the matter. He dries off his hands on the dish towel and turns back around. “What is it?”

Natasha hesitates, only a moment, before she steps forward and takes his hand. He knows the clink of metal, knows the feel of the tags she places in his palm before she even says it. “They’re in pretty bad shape, Steve. But Maria got them when I asked. They’re yours.”

He takes a deep breath, clenches his fingers around the metal. They’re not whole, he doesn’t have to be looking at them to know the edges are chipped and they’re rusted. “Thank you, Nat.”

She smiles, pats his shoulder. “I’ll keep you updated on the mission if I can. Take care of yourself, Rogers. Take care of him too, but for the love of god, take care of _yourself_.”

“I think I can manage it.” He wiggles his fingers, shooing her in the direction of the door. “Go kick some Nazi ass. Bring me back a souvenir.”

“I’m not bringing you their heads,” she walks backwards.

“Just one?” His teasing question is met with her middle finger and her closing the door behind her as she leaves; the apartment silent once more aside from the ever present buzz of electricity, and Bucky’s soft snoring from the bedroom. He looks down, opening his hand finally. The tags resting in his palm are significantly more worn than he remembers them being before, rust damaged and chipped, but he can still make out the writing.

**James B Barnes**

**32557038 T42 0**

**S. Rogers**

**569 Leaman Place**

**Brooklyn NY. H.**

He traces his finger over the rusted lettering, punched into the metal so long ago. It’s worn almost smooth in places, where he’d worried his thumb back and forth over it, huddled down in the trenches and not knowing if they’d make it to morning. He still isn’t sure they made it. Yeah, they’re alive, the war is won. But at a cost so steep he couldn’t have paid it if he’d known ahead of time just how high it was. Closing his eyes, he wraps the chain around his wrist like his mother wore her rosary. He’d spent the majority of his teenage years fighting against what had been instilled in him from childhood. Be angry all the time? Go to hell. Have a sexual thought? Go to hell. 

Have a sexual thought about your best friend? Who happens to be a boy? When you are also a boy?

Well.

Instead of spending his weeks on his knees, saying his Hail Marys; instead of submitting to confession. Steve had given up on being afraid of going to hell and decided if he was headed there on a short road anyway, he might as well raise it on earth while he could. And by god, had he done his best. 

So he doesn’t feel guilt when he raises the tags to his lips, he doesn’t fear that God himself will strike him down for the kiss he presses to the warm metal. He feels nothing but a tiny piece of himself settling back into place. He can’t keep them, not now. Rightfully, they should go to Bucky, but until he wakes up again, they’re Steve’s. For just a little while longer.

The pasta isn’t perfect, but it turns out better than he was expecting, fragrant with Italian herbs and swimming in a creamy sauce. He’s on his second bowl when Bucky wanders out of the bedroom, rubbing his hand across his eyes. His hair is fucking matted to hell- Steve hasn’t been able to get him to comb it and he won’t let Steve close enough to try and detangle it himself. The only thing to do with it now really is to cut it off. But he’s not going to bring that up just yet. “Hey, Buck.” He pushes the chair across from his out from the table with his foot, nodding at it and the big serving bowl full of food. “Come eat.”

It’s been rough, Bucky relearning how to eat. He’d held the utensils like weapons, inhaled the food so fast that he’d ended up choking and then he’d throw it all up an hour later, his stomach just not used to having anything in it. But they’re working on it. Slowly but surely. 

Bucky silently sits, silently dishes a generous serving into the bowl Steve had laid out for him, silently eats. 

It’s still unnerving, even though he’s getting used to it. Steve pokes a piece of chicken with his fork. “Um. So Natasha won’t be coming by for a little while. She’s been sent out of the country on a mission.” Only the flicker of Bucky’s gaze from his bowl to Steve’s face indicates he’s listening. “She brought something with her when she said goodbye. I’ll show it to you when we get done eating.” Bucky nods, short and sharp, and shoves a forkful of pasta in his mouth. 

Steve finishes before Bucky, but he sits at the table and talks about anything that happens to come to mind, until Bucky finishes eating. Then he takes both their bowls to the sink and washes them and puts the leftovers away before joining Bucky in the living room. He’s curled up on one end of the couch, staring blankly at whatever sitcom show Jarvis had put on the TV. Steve clenches his hands around the tags in his pocket. He wants to keep them, wants them resting against his collarbone where they belong again. But Bucky doesn’t have any pieces of himself left right now. It would be selfish of Steve to keep anything back. He takes a deep breath, pulling them out and holding them out to Bucky. Dangling between the two of them. “These are yours. I had them with me when I… got here. But you should have them now.”

Bucky reaches out and Steve lets them fall into his hand. 

“They were yours… um… before.” He pulls his arms in tight to his torso, wraps them around his waist and _breathes_ so he doesn’t snatch them back. “I’m just gonna… clean up the kitchen.” He’d already cleaned up any mess he’d made while he was cooking but he needs to do something so he pushes to his feet and turns away.

“Wait.” Bucky grabs the side of Steve’s sweatpants, his voice hoarse from disuse. Steve’s breath catches in his chest when he slowly turns back to face Bucky. He’s holding onto the tags like a lifeline, something lost in his expression as he looks between them and Steve. “I-” his brow furrows. “I gave them to you.”

“Yes,” the confirmation comes out in a whisper.

“It was nighttime in… London?”

“Yes.” He slowly, oh so slowly, sits down again. Lightheaded from the way his heart is trying to beat right out of his chest because Bucky is _remembering_. “It was London.”

Bucky rubs his thumb over the tags, clicking them together. “I gave them to you because… because….” He frowns, frustrated. “Why did I?”

“Because you wanted me to have something to know I wasn’t alone in the war. I knew it anyway, but you wanted me to have a piece of you so I’d always remember.”

“That’s not why.” Bucky scowls at him.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says, carefully so he doesn’t give away how he’s speaking around his heart in his throat. He _doesn’t_ know what Bucky means by that, it’s not a lie. He’s afraid to even guess at it. “I only know what you told me.”

Bucky’s scowl deepens, but it’s not directed at Steve. He’s glaring at the tags like they personally wronged him. It’s really only a moment, but it stretches, endless while Bucky silently stares at the worn metal. Finally he flicks the chain into Steve’s lap and stands in one smooth motion. “Keep them. They’re supposed to be yours.” He turns on his heel and strides back into the bedroom.

Steve clutches the tags in his hand, sitting in the same spot, for long after Bucky’s quiet snoring starts up again.

***

Instead of going to his next therapy session, Steve goes out on his balcony and considers jumping. Bucky won’t even fucking look at him since the dog tag incident, four days ago. He holds tight to the metal around his neck as he sits on the concrete staring at the ant sized city below and he thinks about it. It’s a selfish, awful idea. He’ll never actually do it, of course. Not now that he has Bucky back. Even if Bucky never has anything to do with him again. So he doesn’t actually stand up, doesn’t try to lean over the glass railing. He just looks. 

With shaking fingers, he dials the number he had saved into his phone and then forgotten about in the chaos of the past weeks.

He dials Sam Wilson. 

“Hello?” The call picks up on the second ring, the voice cautious but pleasant.

Steve can’t speak for a moment. Doesn’t even know why he called or what he should say. He swallows. “Hi. Um. You forgot to give me a list of Studio Ghibli movies to watch.” Stupid. He should have led with an introduction. It sounds like he’s jumping on the guy’s case about a movie recommendation when they literally kidnapped him. “Sorry we kidnapped you,” he blurts out before Sam can speak.

A tinny laugh comes through the speaker. He has the call on speaker, holding the phone out, away from him. The buzz of the phone’s power is too loud when he takes a call and holds it against his ear. It makes his head nearly split with the pain. He’d learned that lesson quickly. “Steve, buddy, that _‘kidnapping’_ you speak of? Sure, I had to sign a shit ton of NDAs but then I got a flight home on a private Stark jet with gourmet food and alcohol flowing freely. And yesterday I found out my mortgage was paid off. Feel free to kidnap me again anytime.”

He huffs, shifting so he can lean back against the glass railing. It gives him a good viewpoint into the apartment. Bucky is sitting in the armchair, methodically cleaning the plates in his new arm the way Tony had shown him. It’s gold, not silver like the old one, but they’re pretty similar in design. There’s no more red star on his shoulder either. “Your house secure? No problems with proximity to the safehouse?”

“Quiet as the suburbs ever are,” Sam says. “I’m texting you a list of films right now.” Sure enough, Steve’s screen lights up with an incoming message. “How’s your boy? Doing good?”

Steve bites the inside of his cheek, looking back at Bucky. “He’s… been through a lot. We’re working on it.” He doesn’t know what Sam might have been smart enough to deduce from their brief time together, so he doesn’t want to say anything and accidentally reveal highly classified intel just because he’s desperate to talk to _someone_. It’s been radio silent from Natasha, but then again, deep cover missions usually are. He’s not comfortable enough with anyone else on the team to actually talk to them about it. He _definitely_ doesn’t want to talk to his therapist. That’s the whole point of him hiding out on the balcony right now. 

Not that he’s really that hard to find, if anyone was looking for him.

But no one ever is.

He idly picks at the skin on the back of his hand. “But uh… anyways. Thanks for the movie recommendations. I guess I’ll let you go, I don’t want to intrude-”

“Hey, no. It’s all good. I’ve got nothing going on, honestly. I’m sitting on my couch in my pajamas, playing Skyrim. You wanna talk, we can talk.”

“Oh.” The word Skyrim doesn’t mean anything to him but it’s evidently some sort of game. “I really don’t… there’s not much I can say. My entire life is classified.”

Sam is quiet for a long moment, breathing softly. Finally, he clears his throat. “That’s okay. What are you doing today? Anything fun?”

He wouldn’t exactly call contemplating throwing himself off a balcony _fun_. “I’m skipping therapy.”

“That doesn’t sound healthy.”

“I’m the picture of health.” He knocks his head back against the railing. It’s like he’s had this conversation before. With his therapist. “And don’t give me that mental health versus physical health line. That’s what I’m _avoiding_.” He shifts, turning to look out over the city again. 

“I-”

Fuck, he’s made it awkward. Why can’t he just… just… _not_ fuck up everything with everyone. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” He fumbles at the collar of his t-shirt, pulling his tags out by the chain. The ragged edge of the metal scrapes across his thumb when he rubs it, tearing at the skin. 

“It’s okay.”

“I should go.” He should do… something. Go try and see if Bucky will acknowledge his presence today. Before he says anything else incriminating. 

“If that’s what you want. But you can call me anytime if you need someone to talk to. Life is pretty tough sometimes. You don’t have to go it alone, Steve.”

“I can get by on my own.” The words come out on reflex even when he knows the truth; he can’t get by on his own. He was destroying himself with calculated efficiency before he got Bucky back and he’s barely holding it together now. 

“You don’t have to.” 

Steve drops the phone, twisting around to stare at Bucky. He’s standing in the doorway, hands awkwardly shoved into his pockets, his face twisted up. “What did you say?” He whispers. 

Bucky ducks his chin, his hair falling forward. “I know those words.”

He’d said that, the day that they had rescued him from Hydra. And it’s foolish to hope but Steve looks up at Bucky, holding the tags tight in his fist, his chest aching with missing him. Bucky’s standing right in front of him and still, Steve _misses_ him. “Where do you know them from, Buck?”

“I- I don’t know.”

_Yes, you do._ The words are on the tip of his tongue, begging to be said. Begging to be right. It’s so hard, looking up at Bucky’s face now and not being able to just crumble into him. He’d spent so many years pushing him away. This is his penance for not letting Bucky take care of him when he’d wanted to. And now that he’s falling apart from the inside out, shaking hands and fluttering panic in his chest demanding he run away or break down completely- now that he _needs_ to be able to lean on Bucky for support. He can’t. Bucky’s the one who needs him to be strong now.

He can be strong.

He can.

He.

Be _strong_ , Steven. 

It’s all too easy to paint himself as the villain in his own memories. If he’d listened more, if he’d sent Bucky home after Azzano, if he’d looked for his body, if he’d- 

“Tell me about the words.” Bucky sits in front of him, cross-legged.

Steve swallows hard, shoving his hands under his thighs so he doesn’t reach out and touch. Just the fact that Bucky is talking to him is progress. The fact that he’s _asking questions_ is even more than he should hope for. But Steve hopes for a lot of things, even when they seem impossible. He always has. “When my mother died, you found me at my tenement after her funeral. You said you’d wanted to give me a ride, but all I could think about was how I needed to prove I could take care of myself.” He speaks softly, to the soundtrack of the city- sirens below and planes overhead. Car horns and engines and jackhammering from the nearby construction. The balcony is far enough off the ground that the noise is muted, distant. White noise, really. “You always saw right through me. You knew I couldn’t.”

“You were small.”

“I was small.” He scrapes his thumb over the ragged metal of his tags again. Glances up at Bucky and catches his breath at the look on his face. He’s squinting at Steve, pale skin and parted lips. Shock. “You said-”

“I’m with you till the end of the line.” Bucky’s right hand spasms and he squeezes his eyes shut, shaking his head. He digs his teeth into his lower lip, breathing roughly through his nose. “I… I- Steve?”

His heart is swelling in his chest, thumping hard and quick, pounding against the pulse point in his neck. “Yeah?”

“It… it wasn’t because you couldn’t take care of yourself.” Bucky’s frowning again, frustrated, the way he had over the tags. “He- _I_ didn’t….” he cuts off, gritting his teeth. “I took care of you because I….” his right hand reaches, covers Steve’s on the dog tags, pulling his thumb away from where he’s digging it against the sharp edge of the metal. “Don’t.”

“You don’t have to take care of me anymore, Buck.” He doesn’t dare move his fingers, his entire focus zeroed on the point of contact. Bucky’s hand is warm and calloused and familiar enough that he aches with it. If he could, he’d stay in this moment forever. Soaking up the warmth, wrapping the tattered pieces of himself in it as well as he can. “I’ll take care of you.”

“Don’t skip your... therapy again.” Bucky pulls his hand away, getting to his feet. “I’m hungry.”

“Sure,” Steve grabs his fallen phone, shoving it in his back pocket as he stands. “I found a recipe for enchiladas last night. Sound good?”

Bucky hums, heading for the kitchen.

It’s only later, after they’ve cooked and eaten that it occurs to Steve that he’d forgotten all about his phone conversation with Sam. He pulls the phone from his pocket, frowning at a crack across the screen. There’s three unread messages, from an unsaved contact. The first is the list of Ghibli movies. The second reads **If I’m overstepping, just tell me. I know some people in New York who work with victims of severe psychological trauma. POWs, mostly. I hung up the call when I realized you weren’t talking to me anymore, but I’ve heard enough and I’m a smart guy. You can’t rehabilitate someone who’s been through whatever he’s been through on your own through sheer force of will. He needs help and I know it’s classified to all hell. But I wouldn’t suggest these people if I didn’t trust them. Let me know if you want the contact information on them.**

The third simply says **You are not alone.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bucky's seizures are based off of my own. i haven't gone into much detail on them here, but i probably will in future chapters. i say 'probably' because while bucky does play a big role in this fic, it is mostly centric on steve's mental health. that's why i've been glazing over the particulars on what's going on w bucky for now. this is also not meant to be a long fic (im trying to keep it under 50k) so i'm trying not to wax poetic and let this story run away from me. i used steve's 616 comics address for the tags and based the format for the information on the tab off of that picture that sebastian stan posted of bucky's tfatws dog tag. it's not historically accurate to the tag format that ww2 soldiers got but i really wanted to put steve's name on them as next of kin so i said fuck accuracy i do what i want.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im so sorry about the gap between updates. i had another death in my family and got so sick with the flu that i had a 106 degree fever and school on top of that. 2020 has kicked my ass so far. it's just been really hard to find time and motivation to do things i enjoy anymore but i managed to complete this chapter at long last. i don't feel great about it but i'll let yall decide if it was worth sticking around for or not. sorry again i really do feel horrible about not updating for so long.

For the first time, Steve is woken from the prison of his nightmares not by choking on vomit in the back of his throat, but by two hands on his face, one warm and one cool, and a soft voice saying his name urgently. The same voice that screams it in Steve’s head every night. He shudders, gasping as he fumbles upright. His chest burns, like there really is still ice in his lungs, like he never left his arctic grave at all. He can’t _breathe_. “B-B-Buck-”

“Hey, it’s okay.” Bucky’s left hand trails down, over his jaw and the pulse point on his neck, down to rest on his chest. Thoughtless muscle memory. “‘S just a bad dream, Steve. Deep breath, now. C’mon, in for one, two, three, four.”

Steve clutches at Bucky’s left wrist, his heart thundering against his rib cage. He breathes in because his body responds to Bucky’s gentle instructions like it’s the only constant he’s ever known. He breathes because in the pitch black darkness of the room and with Bucky’s lazy accent in his ear, it’s all too easy to pretend he’s home and he’s safe and the horrors in his head are just that. Only in his head. Panic attacks can feel like asthma if he doesn’t think. 

And Bucky is _touching_ him.

He doesn’t dare lean into the touch, doesn’t let himself slump against Bucky’s chest- so close but so far away- because if he hugs him, he may never be able to let go. And when whatever is spurring Bucky to… not flinch away from him, to talk to him like he used to wears off, when Bucky is gone again and the ghost of him is all that remains, Steve won’t be able to stop touching him if he starts. It’s just been so long since anyone has hugged him. He might have been unaware of the years in the ice, but his skin had felt it. His skin knows that no one was there. His skin is still perpetually cold, an ache just underneath, against his bones. It prickles when he greets someone with a handshake, when his teammates pat him on the shoulder in passing. They’re not the touches he wants, but he’ll take _anything_ at this point. So he closes his eyes, zeroes his attention on the bloom of warmth where Bucky’s hand is still against the side of his face. _Don’t let go,_ he begs silently, _stay with me_

Bucky doesn’t move his hand, but it does tense as Steve’s breathing evens, slow and controlled. “You’re okay.” The Brooklyn accent is gone, the near placeless pronunciations of the Winter Soldier back again. Albeit for the slight drag of his Rs, it could be from any region.

No, he’s not. Nothing has been okay in a long time and he’s not sure it ever will be again. But he has to _act_ like it is. He has to be strong. “Yeah, Bucky. Thank you.”

“You were….” Bucky’s fingers flex against his skin, tracing under his eye, brushing against the bridge of his nose. “I heard you. It sounded like you were crying, but you’re not.” The hands drop away and his heart nearly stops in his chest at the loss.

What’s he supposed to say to that? That part of him is fucking broken and it’s sick that he hadn’t even cried over Bucky’s death. How does he say that to him? How does a person forget how to cry? He swallows hard, glancing over at the digital clock on the nightstand. Dim blue letters read **3:28**. Too early to be up, really, but too late to go back to sleep. Even if he could. “Are you going back to bed?”

“Probably not.”

“Jarvis, lamps on, please.” Steve pushes his blankets aside as the lights come on, dim golden light illuminating the room. He glances over at the slightly open door of his closet. “I have something for you.” It’s been a few days since the incident on the balcony. Bucky’s been talking more, seeming to remember more. So it’s only right to bring out the box that Steve had packed up so long ago. He pulls it down from the top shelf, wincing at the bloodied handprints that he’d put on it the day he got it back. 

Bucky is still sitting on Steve’s bed, his legs curled underneath him. He tracks Steve’s motions silently as he walks back to the bed, box cradled under one arm. The cardboard is old and brittle, but maybe it doesn’t matter since it’s not a memorial of someone lost anymore. 

“When you fell, I was the one to go through and pack up your belongings,” Steve sets the box next to Bucky, tracing the faded handwriting on the lid. “This is everything that you had. The stuff from our apartment got donated to museums or sold to private collectors, I guess. But this is the stuff you had in the war.”

Bucky pulls the box closer, hesitating only long enough to glance up at Steve before he pulls the lid off. The contents are musty with age and trapped air and they both grimace. The first item he pulls out is his old canteen, long empty. He sets it aside and brings out the playing cards next. “You were shit at poker,” he rubs his thumb across the cards, gaze flicking to Steve’s face. “But you played every time?”

“Could never turn down a challenge,” Steve ducks his chin, suppressing a smile. They’d mostly played against each other which didn’t work out very well for Steve since Bucky knew his every tell. But he still never lost, not really. He got to see Bucky’s self satisfied smirk when he won and that was prize enough for Steve. Besides, they basically shared their funds so even if Bucky cleaned him out one night, he’d slip it right back into Steve’s pouch before the next morning. Or they’d pay for each other’s things. It didn’t really matter.

The cards get tossed aside with the canteen and are quickly followed by the holey socks, ammo, and field medic kit. He spends a few moments flipping through the stack of postcards and letters but they’re not what he stops on.

When he gets to the sweetheart letter, his entire body freezes.

Slowly, oh so slowly, he turns it over, tracing his fingers over the sealed seam of the envelope. “It’s not open.” He glances up at Steve, just a tinge of pink on his cheeks, his eyes wide.

“Yeah, uh.” Steve rubs his hand over the back of his neck, “You never told me you had a steady girl and there was no address. I couldn’t bring myself to open it without feeling like it would violate your privacy over something you didn’t want me to know.” It still kind of hurts, that Bucky had kept that secret from him. But it doesn’t even matter now. They have bigger problems.

Bucky’s lips press into a thin line and he clenches his hand around the envelope. He squeezes his eyes shut and breathes harshly through his nose.

“Bucky? You okay?”

“Yeah…” he opens his eyes, looking everywhere but at Steve as he dumps everything back in the box and gets to his feet with it. “I think I’m going back to bed after all.”

“Oh. Sure. Sleep well?” Steve steps back as Bucky brushes past him, heading for the open bedroom door. 

It slams shut behind him. 

The silence rings in Steve’s ears and he takes an unsteady breath, staring at the imprint of where Bucky had sat on his bed. It makes sense, that Bucky would be upset to find out that he’d been in love with someone out there. Someone long gone now. Of course anyone would be upset at finding out something like that. It’s nothing Steve did. 

He glares at the alarm clock, still far too early to be up but he’s wide awake now. Sighing, he walks back to his closet, changing into a pair of nylon running pants and a moisture wicking t-shirt. He shoves his debit card into one of the zip up pockets and heads for the elevator. 

The City That Never Sleeps is an apt description- even though there are _less_ people out than the usual crushing madness of Manhattan, the streets are still teeming with people. He dodges a group of drunk friends, turning a corner. There’s no particular destination in his mind, but he couldn’t stay in the apartment for the rest of the night, waiting for the light of day. It’s warm out, summer heat sticky on his skin. He roams aimlessly, away from familiar streets to parts of the city he hasn’t been to, not in any century. They hadn’t made it out of Brooklyn all that much, growing up- too broke to stray too far away from their own borough. 

He looks to the sky, hazy with smog, too bright to see the sky anymore and he misses Brooklyn. The city hadn’t been so bright back then- so big that no one could see the stars anymore. Summer nights were meant for laying on the fire escape, picking constellations out of the sky. _Not_ for running away from his heart because he doesn’t know what to do with it anymore. Every step forward is met with four steps back and he’d been warned it would be like this. His heart is being swallowed up whole by the loneliness of it all, just as the city lights swallowed up the stars. 

He’s not even running, not even jogging. Hands shoved into the pockets of his track pants as he trudges along the unfamiliar streets with his chin ducked down to avoid eye contact with anyone else. Eventually he’s forced to turn around, to trek back toward the Tower even though he’s no more at peace than he was when he left but the sun will be up soon and the streets will be flooded with people trying to get to work. He’s not really in the mood to take selfies with fans today. There’s a bodega a block away from the Tower, one with a fat orange cat that sleeps in the window and the type of employee that doesn’t give a shit who he is or what he buys, no matter what image it sends about him. 

“Can I get a pack of the Lucky Strikes,” he leans his hip against the grimy counter. The college kid running the register barely glances at him before turning around to grab the smokes. Steve swipes his card and pockets the carton, turning on his heel. He pauses to rub the cat’s ears before heading outside again. Across the street a bakery has only just flipped their sign from closed to open so he ducks through their door too and orders two dozen cinnamon buns. 

He takes the elevator all the way up to the roof of the tower, to the bench facing the sunrise. It hadn’t been out here when Steve had first moved to the tower but not a full day after Tony had caught Steve smoking out here, it had appeared. So had an ashtray. He devours three of the cinnamon buns before he lights his smoke, just as the sun starts to rise on the horizon. That’s how Bucky finds him, shaking fingers gripping a cigarette. 

“You don’t like the taste of smoke,” Bucky says quietly, standing next to him. He holds his hand out until Steve passes him the burning cigarette and he takes a long pull from it. “Why’d you pick up the habit?”

“I felt closer to you.” He doesn’t look away from the horizon. It’s chilly, this high up. The wind buffets them, unforgiving and making goosebumps stand up on his skin. Bucky hands the cigarette back and he sucks in more of the burning, acrid smoke, coating his lungs in it. Maybe it’ll burn away the emptiness this time.

“I’m sorry for storming out last night.”

“You don’t have to apologize, Bucky.” He swallows. “Maybe I shouldn’t have… maybe you weren’t ready for that.”

“No, that’s the thing. I think I am. It’s… hard to explain. I’m not stupid. I’ve been trying… to be what you want me to be. But I’m not stupid and I know I’m messed up. Sometimes talking is hard and sometimes my head hurts a lot, when I’m remembering things. I hadn’t been remembering much until… I read the letter. And now I’m… remembering… things.”

That gets his attention. He turns, studying Bucky’s somber features. “What kind of things?” His voice is steady, as if his heart isn’t lodged up high in his throat. It doesn’t even matter that it stings that the sweetheart letter had been the trigger of Bucky’s memories and not Steve’s presence. Bucky is _remembering_.

Bucky licks his lips, shoving his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants. “From before. I think.” He tilts his head, jutting his chin out just a little, a ghost of his old cockiness. “There was a little girl. I braided her hair every morning.”

“Rebecca. Your sister. She was so proud of her _Bucky Braids_.” Steve smiles. The three of them had been stairsteps, Bucky a year older than Steve and Steve a year older than Becca. Of course, she’d ended up taller than Steve before he got the serum but still…. 

“I remember you were sick a lot. I remember being scared for you.” Bucky takes the stub of the cigarette from him, inhaling the last of it before flicking it into the ashtray and putting it out with his metal thumb. “You don’t get sick anymore, right?”

Only in his heart and apparently his mind. “No, Buck. I can’t get sick.”

Bucky pulls a cinnamon bun from the bag and bites into it, smiling at Steve. “Good.”

***

Life doesn’t magically right itself just because Bucky is remembering more, because every day there’s a bit more of the boy Steve had always known showing up in his words and his memories. They’re still a fucked up mess with more nightmares than peaceful sleep. But Bucky talks to one of the therapists that Sam had recommended and Steve quits skipping his appointments and it gets a little easier every day. 

Summer has the city in its grip and when they finally get clearance to leave the tower, they spend lazy afternoons in the quiet corners of the park. Bucky likes to feel the grass against his skin and the sun on his face- cheeks already turning bronzed with tan instead of the pale, sickly look he’d had when they’d taken him from Hydra- and Steve likes to watch Bucky. He gets his hand on a sketchpad and a set of charcoal pencils and after that it’s no holds barred. Page after page filled up with features he thought he’d never be able to draw without crushing grief again. Bucky pretends like he doesn’t know Steve is drawing him, just the same as he always did, but he gets the same smug smirk at the corners of his lips every time he glances over and notices the pencil in Steve’s hand. 

Steve pretends like it doesn’t make his heart soar.

Not once has Bucky asked what happened to his sweetheart, but he spends a lot of time with Tony and Natasha- when she’s not out on missions- when Steve is working out or at his therapist appointment. So maybe he’s asked one of them to find out what happened to her instead of asking Steve. It would make sense, since they both have better resources for tracking someone down than Steve does. 

“So I’m in New York for the next two weeks,” Sam tells Steve over the phone. Somehow they’ve become close even though on his bad days Steve still has the tendency to try and push everyone away. Sam just responds to that by sending Steve dumb memes and animal pictures. “My sister had surgery on her knee and I’m staying with her so she’s not trying to get around on her own when her husband is at work. But it’s the weekend and he’s home so I’m free. We should meet up for lunch!”

“Yeah, that would be nice.” Steve wedges the phone between his shoulder and his ear so he can grab the pen and pad of paper from the table by the couch. He doodles, random shapes and the like. Just something to keep his hands busy so that he doesn’t pick at his skin until it bleeds. It’s one of the ‘healthy coping mechanisms’ that his therapist is trying to get him into. It doesn’t really help with the big knot of anxiety in his chest that wedged itself there the moment Sam suggested meeting up but it _does_ keep him from hurting himself to try and get it out. That’s the goal, right? “I can be free for lunch.” 

“No mission I’m keeping you from?”

“Nah.” He’s been pretty much benched from all missions for the time being anyway. Much as he would love to go drive his fist into Hydra’s gut and rip out all of their organs, kill by bloody kill, Bucky needs him here. Natasha and Clint and the other _real_ SHIELD agents have it handled. “Is your sister’s knee going to be okay?”

“Yeah, she just tore her meniscus. Rough since she’s a ballet dancer but she says it’s mild so she just has to keep up with the PT and she’ll be on her feet again, good as new.”

“That’s good.” He flips the pen around, tapping the capped end against the paper. Bucky is sitting cross legged on the coffee table, entirely focused on the TV. There’s some sort of report playing, about a rover named Curiosity landing on Mars. For Bucky, who adored everything about space, it’s got him practically glowing with fascination.

For Steve, who just had to save the planet from aliens attacking with intent to kill… space has kind of lost its charm. 

“So, lunch?” Sam asks. “I’m in Midtown near the Tower already. Where do you wanna meet?”

“I don’t care,” he says. And he doesn’t. He hasn’t really had the chance to go out and try enough places to be able to suggest somewhere to eat. “You pick.”

“I’ll text you an address.”

“Okay,” he hesitates, “Can I-”

“Bring him,” Sam says and it sounds like he’s smiling. Even though Steve hasn’t actually told him the full story, Sam is a smart guy and Steve is fairly sure he’s figured out who Bucky is at the very least. “I’ll see you in a few.”

When Sam hangs up, Steve tosses the phone onto the couch cushion and looks over at Bucky again. “Wanna go to lunch? Sam wants to meet up.”

“Okay.” Bucky shrugs, pausing his video. He knows who Sam is, even though they didn’t exactly _meet_ meet that day. 

The text comes through with the address of the restaurant, an Italian place a few blocks away. They’re both dressed already so all they have to do is put on their shoes. Steve grabs his wallet from the table next to the door as they walk out, toward the elevator. He watches Bucky from the corner of his eye. There’s a lot of things about them that are different now than from when they were young- not just Hydra’s doing either. The way he shoves his hair behind his ears with an annoyed huff when it falls in his eyes and then repeats the motion thirty seconds later when he looks down and it falls forward again is new. He’s been frustrated with it a lot lately but Steve hasn’t suggested cutting it because he doesn’t want Bucky to think he’s trying to turn him back into his old self or anything like that and Bucky hasn’t mentioned wanting to cut it. 

It’s miserably hot outside, heat rising from the asphalt and the sun beating down on them. By the time they reach the restaurant he’s sporting a rosy sunburn but at least the serum means it’ll heal fast enough. Sam still snickers over it though.

“Who knew Captain America could sunburn?” He stands from his seat as they approach the table, holding out his hand for first Steve, then Bucky to shake.

Bucky pulls out a chair and sprawls in it, loose and lazy. Like he’s unguarded and relaxed, but Steve knows him and sees the tension in the lines of his jaw and shoulders. Sees the way he chose the chair that puts his back to the wall and gives him a sightline of the entire restaurant. “It’s the Irish in him. Knew it from the minute I laid eyes on him and confirmed it when he opened his mouth. Accent so damn thick you nearly couldn’t understand a word that he said.” He smirks over at Steve.

“I was six,” Steve protests, like his heart isn’t pounding because Bucky remembers that.

Bucky shrugs. “I didn’t say it was a bad thing.”

At least the sunburn hides his blush. He clears his throat and pulls his menu closer, bouncing his knee up and down under the table.

“You know, none of my history teachers ever said anything about that particular detail.”

Steve glances over at Sam, lips twisting in a bitter smile. “Yeah, well. They wouldn’t have.” The truth is, Steve’s accent had gotten less noticeable over the years, but he hadn’t lost it completely until after he had gotten the serum. Obviously the country couldn’t have a Captain with an irish lilt in his voice- or a Brooklyn accent either- so they’d sent him to elocution lessons. After the first few strange looks he’d gotten backstage when he’d spoken in his real voice, he’d just stopped using it at all. By the time he made it to the front, the new accent rolled off his tongue as naturally as if he’d always spoken in it. “Captain America had to be- well. _All American_. And everyone hated the Irish so they made sure to erase that bit from my history.”

“That’s fucked up,” Sam says. “Not surprising, but fucked up. But hey, if you feel like revealing your real accent, chances are likely it’ll be wildly popular. People have a real thing for accents now. Look at that one kid… Neil or whatever his name is from that boyband. He’s Irish.”

He has no clue who Sam is talking about but he nods along as if he does. “It probably won’t happen. I’ve been talking like this for so long I don’t even think about it anymore.”

“So are you Irish too?” Sam looks over at Bucky.

“No.” He doesn’t elaborate further, opening his menu and focusing all of his attention on it, his hair falling in his face. Steve’s fingers twitch unbidden, aching with the urge to tuck the hair behind Bucky’s ears.

The waiter takes their orders and returns with their drinks. Steve brings his glass to his mouth, sipping at the fizzy soda so he doesn’t have to speak. He likes Sam, he does, it’s just that he doesn’t know what to say to him now that they’re in person again. As it turns out, he doesn’t have to.

“Your friend Natasha offered me a job,” Sam says casually, like any job Natasha might have offered him is a regular nine to five office job. “Apparently she showed my service record to her boss and he was impressed. I haven’t decided if I’m going to take it.” He sips his water. “I wanted to ask what you think about the… company. Before I consider going back to that career.”

Steve hesitates, glancing around the crowded restaurant. No one seems to be listening in on their conversation but they should still be cautious what they say. “I haven’t had much to do with them. I know they’re corrupt, if that’s what you’re asking. Not all of them but… yeah. Natasha and her… team… are still trying to find all the rotten apples.” And that’s probably why they’re trying to bring Sam in. They need more trustworthy manpower to fight Hydra from the inside and Steve isn’t around to help them this time. “It’s a _hard_ job. Don’t take it unless you’re sure.”

Sam taps his fingers against the tabletop, his lips pressing together as he glances over at Bucky. “They told me.”

Bucky smiles, more bared teeth than anything, bitter. “I’d be out there kicking their asses myself but….” he rolls his eyes, “therapy and shit. They won’t let me yet.”

“Well, the recovery process is important.”

“ _Recovery_?” Bucky scoffs. “The only way that’s gonna happen is if they take all my fuckin’ memories and just let whatever is left be someone new.”

“Bucky,” Steve swallows hard. He just wants to reach across the fucking table and hold Bucky’s hand, just let him know that Steve is _here_ , he’s with him. They’re both fucked up and trying to recover from things that are impossible to come back from. But Bucky is coiled so tightly, tense and clearly not wanting comfort. Steve shoves his hands under his thighs. “You-”

“I didn’t mean it like that.” Sam leans forward slightly, his hands folded on the table in front of him. “I meant that your mental health should be your priority. There are more than enough men with guns in their hands out there. You shouldn’t have to join their ranks again until you’re ready. Either one of you.”

“That goes for you too.” Steve says.

“I know. That’s why I’m taking my time deciding. I will admit I miss my wings.”

“Wings?”

Sam grins. “Well… if you’re _asking_....” 

The conversation for the rest of the meal flows easily and when they finally stand from their chairs to part ways, Sam turns to Steve with a smile and hugs him.

Hugs him.

Steve catches his breath in his throat, hands fluttering at his sides for just a moment before he hesitantly clasps them around Sam’s back and closes his eyes. Every point of contact is like laying in a patch of sunlight after being cold for so, so long. Starting in his chest and spreading through his limbs and he can’t stop the sigh he lets out. Can’t stop the way he slumps into the touch, leaning on his new friend. If Sam is surprised, he doesn’t show it. He tightens his hold, his fingers pressing firmly into Steve’s back and he doesn’t move to release him. Not even when Steve’s breathing turns shaky and uneven and he digs his face into Sam’s shoulder until he can get it under control. 

“I got you,” Sam says, quiet, rubbing Steve’s back.

“Sorry.” Steve whispers, digging his teeth into his lower lip as he pulls back. He shouldn’t have done that. If he wants to keep Sam as a friend he needs to be strong, not almost fall apart at the slightest show of friendly affection- “I’m sorry.”

“Dude.” Sam grabs him by the shoulders and hauls him back in. “You need a hug and I’m here. You don’t gotta let go until you’re ready to. Everyone needs good contact.”

Steve’s pretty sure he needs it more than the average person but until now there’s just been no one he could get that from. If Sam truly is willing, then he needs to soak in this moment as much as he can because he doesn’t know when the next time they’ll see each other will be. He sighs against Sam’s shoulder, glancing over at Bucky.

The look on his face is almost enough to make Steve jerk out of Sam’s embrace again. He’s _glowering_ \- at the back of Sam’s head, not at Steve- his arms folded across his chest. But when his gaze flickers over to Steve’s the look melts into confusion… into _sorrow_. His lips press together and he drops his arms to his sides. He doesn’t look away until Steve finally pulls back from Sam.

And well.

He doesn’t know what that moment of eye contact meant. But something happened. He just doesn’t know what it was or what to make of it. Time will tell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have a plot outline already but it's pretty vague so if there's anything you guys would like to see happen in the story im always open to suggestions!!


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im rly disappointed in this chapter because i know i can do better but im just not in the right headspace to give this story the depth it needs anymore so im just trying to get it done im sorry :(

The entire apartment smells like burned food when Steve steps out of the elevator, exhausted from his latest therapy session. He’s got a folder in hand, full of papers. Full of _homework_ that he’d been sent off with and is supposed to fill out every day and return to Maryam next week. “Bucky?” There’s no reply so Steve tosses the folder on the table by the door and follows the smell to the kitchen.

Bucky is sitting at the island, staring at the faucet on the sink, his expression blank. There’s a pan on the stove, but whatever Bucky had been cooking is a loss judging by the black smoke rising from it. Steve deals with that first because he’s not keen on anything setting on fire. He flips the burner off, pushing the pan to the back of the stove. Its contents are too charred to tell what it had started out as, which means Bucky has probably been seizing for a while. At least it’s just the absence seizures today, not the convulsive ones. They’ve been lucky so far. Bucky hasn’t had any of those when Steve or Natasha weren’t nearby to make sure he didn’t injure himself. But they can’t be with him all the time and one of these days it’s going to happen. Steve needs to figure out what to do about that.

“Jarvis-”

“Sergeant Barnes has been in absence status epilepticus for approximately twenty minutes,” the AI reports, “As I am not connected to your kitchen appliances, I was unable to turn off the stove when the food began to burn. However, had a fire started, I would have engaged the fire suppression system.”

“That’s fine, thank you.” Steve sits on the stool next to Bucky’s, folding his elbows on the marble countertop. There’s nothing he can do but sit with him and wait for it to stop. Bucky has a whole team of doctors and they still haven’t figured out an effective treatment for the seizing. The stuff Hydra had him on apparently worked but it’s not an option. Because of the serum, the fact that he frequently has prolonged episodes of seizing isn’t as big of a concern as it would be in an average person, since it’s not as likely to cause any lasting damage. Especially when it’s nonconvulsive like this. So Steve does what they told him to do. Sit near him, observe him, wait for him to come out of it on his own. It only takes about five minutes.

Bucky blinks hard, shakes his head a little and sucks in a breath. He startles a little when he notices Steve sitting next to him. “When did you get here?”

“A few minutes ago.”

“Oh god,” Bucky groans, rubbing his forehead. He wrinkles his nose, glancing at the stove. “I did it again, didn’t I?”

“Yeah… I don’t know what you were cooking but it’s…”

“Fucking burned. Yeah, I smell it. _Fuck_.”

Steve smiles at him, just a little. “It’s okay. I can make something else. Don’t worry about it.” More likely, he’ll probably end up ordering takeout or seeing if one of Tony’s chefs will send something up for them because he really is drained from his therapy appointment.

Bucky thumps his hand against the countertop, “No, you don’t get it. You always make the food and I just… I noticed you’re tired when you come back from your appointments and I just wanted to have dinner ready so you didn’t have to worry about it. You help me _all the time_. I just wanted to help you for once. I know it wasn’t much but I wanted to do something.”

“Oh,” Steve says softly. He swallows hard against the sudden lump in his throat. “You don’t have to do anything special to help me, you know. You do help. Just you being here helps.” He’s not okay by any stretch of the imagination but he does better with Bucky here. He hasn’t hit the punching bags in weeks. Even when he feels bad, it’s easier to pull himself out of his head when he has something more pressing- _more present_ \- to focus his energy on. “You have no idea how much.” The words come out so quiet he isn’t even sure if Bucky heard them.

“You deserve better than just that.” Bucky’s expression is pinched, lines of pain in his forehead and around his eyes. The post seizure migraine kicking in, probably. But he reaches over, slowly, like there’s any chance Steve would ever pull away, and puts his right hand on Steve’s bare forearm. Steve sucks in a breath. “Look, I remember… some things. Not everything but I remember enough to know, above anything else, I’m supposed to take care of you. ‘Cus you’re important. But you need things I can’t give you. Not yet, at least. You deserve the Bucky who could. But you get me, so until I can, I just wanted to help in other ways.”

“I don’t need anything more than what you’re willing to give, just as you are.”

“That’s not true and you know it.” Bucky squeezes his arm gently. “I’m not ready for that much contact yet. But when I am, I promise you I’ll give you the best hug you’ve ever had.”

“Is this about yesterday?” His ears ring faintly, like a thousand exclamation points going off all at once in his head. Bucky _wants_ to hug him. _Him._ “With Sam?”

“No.” Bucky says, in his lying voice.

“He’ll never replace you, you know. Doesn’t matter if this is as close as we ever get again or not. You’ll always be my best friend.” He might have a lot of friends in his future but he loved Bucky first and he will always love Bucky most. That’s as sure as the sun rising in the east every morning. 

Bucky presses his lips together, pulling his hand back and looking away. “Sorry about the food. Give me an hour and I can come up with something else.” He rubs at his temple and the way he’s squinting in the light of the kitchen is a dead giveaway to how bad his migraine is getting.

“No, c’mon. I know your head is killing you,” Steve slides off his stool, his hands held awkwardly at his sides. “Let’s go in the living room and rest. When you’re ready we can order something in. Jarvis, can you turn off the lights and dim the windows?”

As soon as the room goes dark, Bucky lets out a sigh, some of the tenseness dropping from his shoulders as he stands and follows Steve. “Yeah, okay.” He settles on one side of the L shaped couch, curling up on his side and pulling a blanket tight around him. 

Steve takes the other end, grabbing the book he’s been reading from the coffee table. Even in the darkness, the serum lets him see the words just fine.

“Will you read out loud?” Bucky asks, faintly, voice tight with pain.

“‘Course.” Steve flips back to the front of the book. He’s only a few chapters in anyway, so it’s not like he has to reread much to catch Bucky up on the story. He clears his throat, “Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I never left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death….”

***

Natasha sweeps Steve’s feet out from under him and he goes down hard on the training mat. They’ve been sparring for close to an hour now, both of them sweaty and panting but unwilling to tap out. Bucky had watched for the first twenty minutes or so, calling out suggestions, but even he got bored after a while and wandered away to the leg press machine. Steve huffs, shoving his damp hair away from his forehead and rolls away before Nat can pin him down. The next time she comes at him, he grabs her by the wrist, twisting and pinning her arm against her back and getting his other arm around her in a chokehold. “Give it up.”

She pinches his inner thigh _hard_ with her free hand at the same time as she stomps on his foot and throws her head back to collide with his nose. 

“Ow, fuck, okay.” He releases his hold on her and stumbles back a step, prodding at his smarting nose. “You win.” It’s not that he couldn’t keep going, he definitely could, but his nose hurts and they’re going nowhere. Truth is, he doesn’t even really need to be training. He’s actually thinking of officially handing in a resignation and giving up the shield altogether. Every time he thinks of getting back into the fight again, his skin crawls. There’s no way of knowing now who you’re really working for and he’s just. 

He’s tired. Tired of blood on his hands and the stench of death in his nose. He doesn’t want to feel any more necks snapping under his grip, doesn’t want to clean guts off of the shield ever again. This isn’t what he signed up for when he gave his life to the Army. 

Had he not gotten Bucky back, he probably would have thrown himself head first into every mission SHIELD could hand him, until he inevitably got taken out. But now he has something to actually want to live for. It’s awful of him that he doesn’t feel more of an urge to go out and burn Hydra off the face of the earth for what they did to Bucky, but the truth is, he just wants to savor the time he gets with him now. He wants to find out if there’s a life for them after war. 

He really wants that hug. 

Bucky and Natasha are talking in Russian over by the weight machines so Steve grabs his duffle bag and heads for the gym showers. He could just head up to his floor and shower there but it’s convenient to just do it here. They’re cavernous and have endless hot water. He dumps his bag on the bench and peels off his sweaty clothes, stepping under the spray. It hits his back with perfect pressure and he sighs, bracing his hands against the tile wall of the stall. His eyes slide closed.

His body reacts to the crash in the gym before he can even comprehend what he heard. He’s not in the shower, he’s back on the European front, on his stomach in the freezing mud and shit. Explosions rocking the earth around him, his hand reaching out for Bucky’s through the darkness, seeking the illusion of safety when there is none. He squeezes his eyes tightly shut, curling in on himself. The steamy air is suffocating now instead of soothing, choking in the back of his throat and making his breathing ragged and sharp. 

“You’re not there. You’re not there,” he whispers, forehead digging into the tops of his knees. His throat is cottony, thick. He’s safe, he’s not there. The war is over. “The war is over.”

Saying it aloud doesn’t make his pounding heart slow down or his breathing even out again. The war will never be over, not for him. Until the day he dies, the government will demand him to keep fighting what threats they cannot. And he can’t… can’t do that. He can’t. 

He barely registers reaching up and turning off the water, doesn’t care that he’s still dripping wet when he pulls his clothes on. 

The gym is empty when he heads for the punching bag. 

His fist flies and the sting of impact arcs from his knuckles all the way up his arm. He savors it. Physical pain is nothing, not compared to the awful knot in his chest. Not compared to the way he feels absolutely nothing and everything all at once and he has no idea what to do with any of it. The minutes get lost to the rhythm of his punches and he drifts in his own head. 

He can’t feel his hands when they fall to his sides. The sandbag is stained red again, blood splattered across the leather and on the flood. He swallows hard, glancing down at the damage. Skin torn apart, white bone glinting through. It’s sick, the way he doesn’t feel anything anymore, not when it comes to himself. He was never afraid of pain, didn’t flinch away from the fights, but this… the best he can muster is indifference. What does it fucking matter if he’ll be healed by morning anyway?

Aimless like a ghost, he wanders to the elevators, leaving the gruesome bag behind him. The doors open for him without him even pressing the button and Jarvis takes him straight to his apartment. It’s empty, the lights turned off. Bucky must still be with Natasha. Good. That at least gives Steve a chance to bandage his hands before he sees how bad they are. He heads straight for his bathroom and the comprehensive first aid kit under the sink. The first thing he does is wash his hands; soap in the wounds makes the pain flare sudden and hot. He digs his teeth into his lower lip and keeps going, patting them dry on a clean cloth and then slathering them in antibacterial cream, not that he could get an infection. It’s difficult to wrap the gauze himself, but he manages, his teeth gritted against the pain. 

He doesn’t bother to clean up the medical supplies scattered across the counter. No one goes in his bathroom except him anyway so they can wait until later. He wanders out into the living room and curls up on the couch, his arms wrapped tightly around his middle. The void in his chest has been there for so long, most of the time he doesn’t notice it. Today it’s overwhelming, how empty he feels and yet so heavy. What would America say if they saw what a wreck their beloved captain is behind closed doors? He’s too tired to even lift his head, the weight in his chest spreading through his limbs, keeping him down. It’s pathetic. He’s pathetic. 

What right does he have to act like this?

He stares blankly at the shadows on the wall, watches them get longer as the sun sets and the light in the apartment goes dark. 

The elevator dings, announcing its arrival with the opening of its doors. Steve shifts so he can look over as Bucky walks into the room. And _woah_.

Bucky cut his hair.

It’s longer than army regulations but not cut the same as he’d worn it back in Brooklyn. There’s enough wave to it that without the weight of the longer hair, it curls around his ears. Steve’s ma would have called it too long, a scruffy hobo kind of look. It looks great on Bucky. He wishes he had the energy to be properly enthusiastic. All he manages to say is, “Your hair….”

“Yeah,” Bucky rubs the back of his neck, shrugging his shoulders. “Nat’s been bugging me about it. She knows I hated it longer. Finally just sat down and let her cut it.” He squints at Steve. “Are you okay?”

He swallows hard and nods.

“No, you’re not.” Bucky arches an eyebrow at him and walks closer. He hesitates, only a moment, before sitting down next to Steve and reaching out to take one of his hands. Even through the padding of the gauze, he can still feel it when Bucky traces his thumb over the back of his hand. “What happened?”

“Punching bag.”

Bucky pulls back the edge of the gauze where it’s already starting to fall off from Steve’s shoddy work at bandaging it himself and hisses under his breath. “Jesus, Stevie.”

It takes him a moment to even realize what Bucky said, but when it sinks in, his breath catches in the back of his throat. “What did you call me?”

“Um,” Bucky freezes, sucking his lower lip between his teeth. “It just… happened? I won’t do it again, sorry.”

“No, it’s okay,” Steve pushes himself upright. “I didn’t mind.” Growing up, Bucky had only called him that whenever Steve was really sick and Bucky was really worried. Moments in the dark, delirious with fever, Bucky’s hand clasped around his so tightly he could swear the circulation was completely cut off. _Don’t leave me_ , he’d whispered every time, _so help me God, Stevie, it’s not your time yet. Don’t you dare._. And when Bucky Barnes says your name like a prayer, you goddamn listen.

He looks down at his hand, at Bucky’s fingers deftly rebandaging the wounds. “Do you….”

“I remember.” Bucky glances up at him as he secures the strip of gauze in place with a tight knot. “Did you think I didn’t?” He sighs, shaking his head. “I’ve got more memories than blank spots now, you know. I remember enough to know you’re not doing well.”

“I was fine until today.” It’s more habit than anything, to push back whenever Bucky is concerned. He swallows and pulls his hand away. The contact is too little and he needs too much right now to let it keep happening or else he’ll start pushing for more. And he won’t do that. They’re on Bucky’s timeline, not Steve’s. He can be patient. “It’ll pass.” His voice is hoarse.

“Steve,” Bucky whispers. He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and stands. “Just… stay here. I’ll be right back.” He heads for the hall and slips through his bedroom door. It’s only a few moments before he emerges, a book in hand. 

“What’s that?”

“Anne of Green Gables.” Bucky sits back down and takes a deep breath. “Alright,” he pats his thigh. “Lay down.”

Steve blinks at him. “Are you serious?”

“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t.” The corner of Bucky’s mouth lifts in a half smile. “Told you I remember. C’mon. Like old times. It’s not a hug but… I think I can handle this.”

With his heart lodged in the back of his throat, Steve scoots down the couch so he can stretch out with his head pillowed on Bucky’s leg. He closes his eyes and breathes in and _settles_. A hand stroking through his hair, monitoring a fever that isn’t there. The deep timbre of Bucky’s voice in his ear, the familiar words of the story that had been the soundtrack of his every illness. He’s safe.

He’s home. 

***

Tony decides to throw a pool party for the end of summer. It would be fine, Steve sitting on the edge of the pool with his legs dangling in the water so nobody realizes how deathly afraid he is of being submerged. It would be fine. Except Bucky and Thor are both very shirtless and very much in his sightline, playing fucking water volleyball against Clint and Natasha. 

At least his sunburn is in his favor again, working to disguise the flush on his face as he watches the game. 

“Didn’t know you were such a fan of volleyball,” Tony sits down next to Steve and hands him a fruity looking cocktail with a smirk. “But what a show, am I right?”

Steve gulps down the drink and nearly starts coughing at its potency. “What the hell is in this?”

“Oh, that would be courtesy of Thor. He brought you some of the good Asgardian stuff. Strong enough to kill a mortal man, he said.” Tony sips from his own drink. “Strangely that threat made me want to spike my own glass with it even more, but I refrained.”

“I’m mortal,” Steve turns his attention back to the pool just in time to see Bucky jump up and spike the ball back over the net. Yeah, that’s an image that he’ll be commemorating in his sketchbook later. “The serum didn’t turn me into… into a god or anything. I’m mortal.”

“I mean you did survive the whole being frozen for seventy years thing….”

“I’m just a man, Tony-”

“Hey, on the bright side! If you’re immortal at least your boyfriend is too. You really can live happily ever after.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Steve mutters under his breath and drains the rest of his glass. He kicks the back of his heel against the concrete side of the pool, the cool water swishing against his skin. When he glances up at Bucky again, he’s got his head tipped back toward the sun, his hands pushing his wet hair back from his face. There are water droplets rolling down his summer golden skin and Steve wants to trace the path of every single one of them. He digs his teeth into his lower lip.

“Oh, really.” 

“Shut up.” 

Bucky looks over at them and breaks into a bright grin, swimming over. He props his elbows on the side of the pool next to Steve and squints up at him, his hand shading his face against the sun. “You coming in or not? We’re gonna play another round.”

“Nah,” Steve shakes his head and kicks Bucky gently under the water. More of a nudge than anything. “I think that would just be unfair on poor Clint and Nat. You and Thor are already ganging up on them.”

“You and I both know that if Nat really wanted to win against us she could do it even without Clint’s help.”

“You’re the one who trained her.” 

“Not in _volleyball_.” Bucky rolls his eyes and flicks water at Steve. “Fine, sit on the side. But you’re missing out.” He kicks off from the side and swims back toward the center of the pool, long smooth strokes cutting through the water. 

Steve huffs and stands, taking his empty drink glass back over to the bar. He shakes his head when the bartender asks if he wants another. Whatever liquor Thor had brought is strong enough that he’s already feeling a little bit tipsy and he doesn’t want to risk anything he might say drunk. Instead, he gets a vodka lemonade and hopes it’ll maintain his buzz for at least a little while. He roams over to the other side of the pool deck, where Sam is sitting in one of the lounge chairs. Since he’d decided to sign on for SHIELD, he’d been in the city more, usually hanging out with Nat and Clint, both members of the team he was assigned to. 

“Hey,” Sam grins at him as he sits down in the chair next to him.

“Hi.” Steve sets his drink on the little table between them and pulls his carton of cigarettes out of the pocket of his t-shirt. “Do you mind?” He holds it up. It’s something he’s learned about the future, to ask if those around him mind if he smokes instead of just assuming it’s okay and offering them a cigarette to boot. 

“Nah, go ahead.” Sam waves his hand, shrugging. “They’re not my thing but you do what you gotta do. Not gonna get lung cancer from it anyway, are you?”

“Not as far as I know.” He sticks the cigarette between his lips and lights it, inhaling. “I really do hate the taste of these things.”

“Why keep smoking them then?” 

Steve shrugs, tapping off the ash from the end of the smoke in the ashtray on the table. “Habit now, I guess. I didn’t start until… after Bucky died. Same brand as he always smoked. I wanted to feel… at home. At least a little bit. And now he’s back but I keep puffin’ on these damn things.” He takes another hit, grimacing. “Gives me something to do with my hands. Makes me feel… more settled. So I hate ‘em, but I keep reaching for ‘em.”

“Steve. Buddy. That’s a nicotine addiction.”

“I’m not addicted,” he scoffs, “I could quit if I wanted to. I just don’t see the point when they can’t do any damage to me anyway.” And even if they could, he probably wouldn’t care. He’s good at things like that- not caring about his own wellbeing. He takes one more drag from the cigarette and then grinds the butt into the ashtray. “How’s working for SHIELD?”

Sam purses his lips, well aware that Steve is deliberately changing the subject, but he goes along with it. “Mostly training drills so far. Couple of milk runs. We’re leaving on Tuesday for Greenland. They confirmed an operating base there. Mostly R&D, but it’s something a little more exciting.”

“Be careful.” He takes a sip of his drink.

“Always.” Sam smiles, looking over at the pool. “You two seem more… comfortable with each other lately.”

“Yeah, I think we’re getting somewhere. Slowly but surely.” Casual contact is a regular thing now, even though they haven’t hugged yet. Bucky’s always touching Steve, not much. Just a brush of hands when they pass a plate to the other, or the lightest touch on his shoulder when Bucky’s walking behind him. It’s about to drive him insane. Not that he doesn’t appreciate it, he does. God, he does. But he needs more than fleeting, more than blink and you miss it. “He’ll never be who he was but then again, neither will I. All we have is who we are _now_ and that’s enough.”

“That’s a good mindset to have, in the circumstances. I’m happy for you both.”

Steve looks over to Bucky and he’s never been so grateful for his enhanced vision. Because he can see the droplets of water clinging to his eyelashes and sparkling on his skin. In the pool, with his hair plastered to his forehead and a grin on his face, it’s almost possible to forget all the bad that’s happened to them, even if only for a moment.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi all hope you're doing well in this scary time. my school FINALLY shut down and im quarantining because im def in the high risk category so ive had time to sit down and write without feeling under pressure to be doing More Things and im actually really happy with this chapter i hope you enjoy!! stay safe out there!! even if you're healthy you should be practicing social distancing because you could make a difference in the lives of those people who will be in critical condition or worse if they contract COVID-19. be kind to others.

Steve isn’t quite sure what to make of the past couple of weeks. It had taken him a few days to notice, but now he can’t _stop_. Every day Bucky brings him some sort of gift, whether it be a new set of drawing pencils he ‘picked up while out with Natasha’, the last chocolate chip muffin even though they’re Bucky’s favorite, a new chain for his dog tags. Et cetera, et cetera. He accepts them all gratefully, of course, but he doesn’t know what’s prompted it. 

“He’s like a cat,” Natasha offers, when she’s ensconced herself on Steve’s couch eating _his_ cookies and cream ice cream while Bucky is with his therapist. “You know, how they bring their owners dead mice and birds and shit.If he was cleared for missions he’d probably be bringing you Hydra heads or something so count your blessings.”

“He’s not a cat and I’m not his owner.” Steve grumbles and kicks her lightly. “And stop eating all my ice cream.”

Sam doesn’t have an answer for him either when Steve calls him. “Look man, recovery can be a strange thing,” he says, voice crackling through the speaker like there’s no service where he’s at. “Just let him do his thing and if he wants to tell you about it he will. Just go with the flow.”

Steve sighs. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Thanks, Sam.”

“No problem. Listen, I’m gonna have to let you go soon. It’s almost extraction time.”

“Why did you answer the phone if you’re on a mission?” Steve huffs. He steps around a group of tourists taking up most of the sidewalk between himself and the entrance to the record shop. Jarvis can play any song over the speakers, but it’s just not the same as putting a record on the turntable. Though the radio had already become popular by the time they were into their teens, when Steve and Bucky had moved into their apartment, Bucky’s mother had given them her gramophone as a housewarming gift and it had been with them in every home they’d had together. They never had much, but they always had music. 

He doesn’t know where the player had ended up and doubts he could get his hands on it again even if he could track it down. So Jarvis had ordered a new one to be delivered that afternoon. Steve’s just here, in this musty little store, in hopes that they’ll have a few classics. Hey, Bucky’s not the only one who can bring home gifts.

He’d give anything to see him dance again.

“When Captain America calls, you answer?” Sam jokes.

Steve rolls his eyes, tucking the phone between his shoulder and his ear so he can flip through the vinyls. “What about when just Steve calls?” He hates the weight that people put on him being Cap. He hates _being_ Cap. And the problem here is that Steve’s mouth has always run before his thoughts have a chance to catch up with what he’s saying. “Do you want to take over being Cap?”

“ _What?_ ”

He winces. “Um, look. I’ve given it a lot of thought. I’m done with being… that. I’d rather the mantle went to someone that I trust will do right by it. But either way, I’m done. If you _want_ it, I’ll tell Fury that I want you as my successor. But only if you want it.”

“You’re retiring?”

“Yeah… I think it’s time.” He extracts a Louis Armstrong album from the rack followed by a Benny Goodman one, both records that they had owned in the 30s. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to spring it on you like that.”

“It’s okay. I’m happy for you. You shouldn’t stay in a situation if you’re unhappy with it. And I’m not saying no, but you gotta give me time to think it over before I give you an answer. I really gotta hang up now though.”

“Of course. Talk to you later.” Steve waits for Sam to end the call before he shoves the phone in his back pocket. He sighs and turns away from the display. There’s a teenage girl with fire engine red hair stacking a collection of CDs on a shelf at the end of the aisle. “Pardon me,” he clears his throat, shifting his weight as she looks up, her eyes widening.

“Hi,” she jumps to her feet, pulling her earbuds out. “Sorry, I didn’t notice you coming in.”

“It’s fine.” Actually, unprofessional as it may be, he’s glad she couldn’t hear him. The last thing he needs is some kid leaking the fact that he’s quitting being Captain America before he even turns in his resignation. “I was wondering if you have any Fred Astaire?”

Her teeth flash white against her lip as her brow furrows. “I don’t _think_ so, but let me check the computer.” She sets off toward the front, motioning for him to follow her. “Are you only looking for older records or are you also interested in more modern music?” She slips behind the counter, her fingers flying over the keyboard.

“Um, I came in mostly to get some music from my day but I’m not against newer stuff. As long as it’s not AC/DC.” He’s had enough of Tony blaring that to last a lifetime already. “You got anything calmer, I’ll check it out.”

“I think I know just the thing.” The girl taps her nails against the counter. “We don’t have any Fred Astaire in stock right now, but we can special order if you like. If not, check back whenever you have time to drop by. We buy records from anyone who brings them in to sell so there’s no telling what we may or may not have in stock at any given time.”

“Oh, no worries.” The store is just a few blocks away from the tower, along his usual running route, so he can stop by any time. “Now what else were you saying that you have for me?”

He ends up leaving the store with the two records he had picked out along with a Billie Holiday one, one from a band called The Lumineers, and another titled O by a guy named Damien Rice. They’re all tucked neatly inside a brown paper bag. He stops by bakery near the tower to get more muffins and then heads up to the apartment. 

“Captain, your shipment has arrived.” Jarvis informs him when he gets in the elevator. “Shall I have it sent up to your floor?”

“Is Bucky home?”

“He is currently with Sir having his arm maintenanced.”

“Go ahead and send it up then. I wanna set it up before he gets back.” It’s not _that_ much of a setup, just plugging it in and putting a vinyl on. But it’ll be nice to welcome Bucky home with music playing like he always used to. He drops the bag of records on the coffee table and accepts the package from the delivery guy when he gets there. The turntable is gorgeous, dark wood and white detailing. He sets it up on the table in the corner, stacking the records next to it. He puts the Billie Holiday album on to play while he puts the muffins away before they go stale and settles in on the couch to read. He’s nearly halfway through The Secret History.

It’s not long before Bucky returns, stepping out of the elevator with his hands in his pockets. He halts in his step, his head lifting, eyes finding the turntable in the corner. “Steve-”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Steve marks his place in the book and sets it aside, “Jarvis’ speakers are great. But this is just a little more…”

“Home.” Bucky blinks at him, a smile playing at the corners of his lips. “You and a record and me coming home.”

“Yeah.” He splays his hands, shrugging as he stands. “I thought it would be nice.” _Is it nice?_ his heart pleads. _Is it a piece of yourself sliding back into place when you thought you lost it forever?_

“It’s nice,” the hint of a smile spreads, widens into a full one, big enough that the dimple in his cheekbone shows. “Hey, guess what?”

“What?” He’s barely gotten the word out before Bucky is striding across the room and wrapping him up tight in a hug. Holy shit. Holy _shit_. His breath catches, every nerve ending tuned to the contact. “ _Bucky_ -” _Don’t let go. Please don’t ever let go._

“Sorry it took me so long,” Bucky squeezes him tighter, his flesh hand coming up to grip the back of Steve’s neck. “I’m ready now.”

Steve gasps against Bucky’s shoulder, fingers digging into his shoulders, anchoring himself tightly against the other. A body that has changed, that he hasn’t known since the night before that awful mission, that fucking train. A body that his soul could _never_ forget, that he stayed alive for, even when all he wanted was to die. Bucky had told him once- well, screamed at him more like- _no, not without you_. His brain might have thought that Bucky was lost, but his soul knew they weren’t done yet. “I would have waited as long as you needed.”

“I know. I know you were willing to wait because it’s what I needed. But it’s a two way street, pal. I’m sorry you were needing things too when I couldn’t be there to give them to you. I’m trying to give you what you need now.”

That’s all it takes really, for Steve’s eyes to suddenly burn hot, for his throat to close up with the swell of everything he’s been pushing down for so long. “I missed you,” he half gasps, half sobs against the curve of Bucky’s neck, a day’s worth of stubble rough against his nose and lips. “I missed you so much, I-” once the words start coming, they just won't stop, spilling past his lips, salt on his tongue from the tears that keep flowing. Bucky’s all but holding him up with how badly he’s shaking on his feet. “When it all happened I just… I knew it was my fault and I wanted- I _deserved_ to go with you so I got on that plane, looking for you. But the only thing I found was the future and it was so scary and I was so alone and I missed you and missed you and missed you and then you were here but you weren’t. And I still missed you but I was grateful. Don’t think I was ungrateful,” he pulls back, far enough to look Bucky in the eyes, their noses nearly touching. “Even if you never started talking, even if all of you that I ever got back was the you that I pulled from that fucking cryo machine, I would have been grateful for the rest of my life.” _I would have loved you just as long._ “But… I missed you.”

Bucky’s smile wobbles and his eyes are glassy, tears reflecting the light just before his eyelids slip shut and he presses their foreheads together. “Every time they wiped my memory… you were the very first thing that came back, before they wiped me again. I never stopped missing you either.” He lifts a hand, brushing his fingertips under Steve’s eyes so gently it’s like he’s collecting the tears from his lashes because they’re something precious, not something to be dashed away or ashamed of. “I’m me again _because_ you’re here and you’re _you_. There is no me without you, you hear me?”

Steve’s entire body shudders with his next breath. “I couldn’t- all this time. I couldn’t cry. It hurt so bad all the time and I just… couldn’t. I thought I’d be broken forever.”

“It’s okay to be broken,” Bucky guides Steve’s head back to his shoulder, holds him closer, tighter. Like they’re one, like they always were. “It’s okay, Stevie. You can cry now. I’m here. I’ll take care of you.” His voice is a low rumble in his chest, the beat of his heart a steady pulse through his veins. Even without his ear pressed against his chest, Steve can hear it. 

A ticking clock he’d longed to match his own, stupid heart to.

For the first time that he can remember, they’re finally beating in time.

***

Steve sits in front of his therapist and for the very first time, it doesn’t feel like he’s being crushed from the inside out. He turns in his homework and answers her questions about his week without the words being forced unwilling from his lips. Bucky had hugged him this morning when Steve had emerged from his bedroom and again before Steve had left for his session. And now he’s lit up, every inch of his skin settling, fitting on his body better than it has in years. This is right. This is _good_. “I think….” he trails off and Maryam doesn’t push, waiting patiently for him to collect his thoughts, drag them together to make a sentence. “I think I feel real again.”

“Oh?”

That was the thing with therapy. The therapist gets paid a lot of money to strategically shoehorn him into doing all the talking and normally he resents that but today, scattered though they may be, the words want to come out. “I finally feel like I matter again, like my life is something that’s real and it belongs to me.” It’s not just the hug that’s brought this out, it’s something he’s been building up to over the past few weeks, especially with the decision to retire. “I’ve been reading, right? Books and the internet. They all seem to say codependency is bad. But-”

“I’m going to stop you there,” Maryam raises her hand, smiling at him. “Codependency is _not_ always bad. It can actually be a very good thing, Steve. A relationship is supposed to be a give and take from _both_ sides. If you’re not open with each other, that’s where they start to fail.”

“We’re not… in a _relationship_....” 

“I’m using the term relationship here as any connection between two people. It doesn’t have to be romantic.” She leans forward, her hands clasped over her knees. “Codependency has become a term thrown around for things that it doesn’t really mean. You’ve been through more loss than pretty much anyone can imagine. It’s natural and _healthy_ for you to latch on to what you love and never want to let go. As long as he’s okay with it. Just remember he’s been through hell too.”

“I know. I do. We take care of each other.” He tucks his knees against his chest and rests his chin on the top of them. “We always have. I would _never_ ask him for anything he was uncomfortable giving. That’s why I’ve never-”

“Never…?”

Steve licks his lips. These sessions are completely confidential, he knows that. And yet the truth hurts and he flinches away from the words even as he says them. “That’s why I never told him I’m in love with him.”

A soft smile turns the corners of her lips. “I’m not going to tell you what to do, Steve, that’s entirely up to you. But do you want to know my thoughts, after the things you’ve told me over our sessions.”

“I…” Does he want to hear them? “I guess.”

“Firstly, I’ve never met him, I only know him through what you’ve told me. But telling someone you love them isn’t necessarily the same thing as asking them to be in a romantic relationship with you. And even if his feelings aren’t romantic in nature, I know he loves you. You know he loves you. I doubt very much that he would hold your feelings against you or be uncomfortable. It’s not a bad thing to be loved. Unless… I know society was different for you both….”

“Oh. No,” Steve shakes his head, “he never judged anyone like that. We lived in the poorest part of Brooklyn. Most everyone we knew was… not accepted by society. He just didn’t know I was queer too. He always went with girls though. I know he doesn’t feel the same way and that’s okay. I just don’t want things to change with us.”

“Did you not also go with girls despite feeling for him the way you do?”

“I hardly went with _anyone_ ,” he snorts. “Only when Bucky managed to con some poor girl into bringing her friend or sister on a blind double date. And I usually got ditched before the first hour was over.” Which was okay with him for the most part because he usually never wanted to be there anyway. Not to sit in a booth in the corner and watch Bucky swing both of their dates around the dance floor. 

“So Bucky was good with girls?”

“That’s an understatement. He had more charm in his little finger than I ever had in my whole body. He was always flirting, always had them wrapped around his finger, always found some little something to gift them every time he saw them….” 

“Oh, _really_?” Maryam smirks at him. “Well now, doesn’t that sound familiar?”

Steve swallows and looks away. “I think we should focus on the real therapy now. Don’t you want to judge my homework or something?” It does sound familiar. He just can’t even entertain that idea right now.

Familiar, indeed.

***

It’s nothing, really. Steve keeps the words on repeat in his head. It’s nothing. It’s just Bucky trying out different aspects of his personality as they come back to him because he had always turned to Steve when he’d needed to practice something. It’s just another step in his recovery, just like Sam suggested. It’s not him actually… actually _courting_ Steve. It can’t be. 

He scowls, tapping the end of his pencil against the page of his sketchbook, a half drawn scene of Bucky and Natasha curled up on the couch, completely absorbed in some reality dance competition show they’ve got playing. Now just who is Bucky interested in enough that he’s practicing on Steve to get back into the flirting groove? It _can’t_ be Nat. For fuck’s sake, he’s the closest thing she’s ever had to a father figure. There’s no one else that comes to mind, no other girls on the team but that doesn’t mean anything. Steve isn’t with Bucky a lot of the time, he doesn’t have a clue who he might have met outside the tower that could have caught his fancy. 

“Can you do that?” Natasha murmurs low, her spoon of _Steve’s_ ice cream paused in front of her face.

Bucky grimaces at whatever is on the screen. “No, because _that_ is a goddamn travesty and I’m better than that. Steve,” he points at the tv. “Quit drawin’ me and look at this shit.”

Sucking his lower lip between his teeth, he looks over at the show. The couple is dancing a jive- badly. They’re too stiff and it’s just… wrong. “What even….”

“They’re butchering it!” Bucky snaps, throwing his arms up in the air. “This is painful to watch. Where’s the liveliness? _Steve_.”

Natasha smirks at the two of them. “And I suppose you two perpetual bachelors are, naturally, the dancing experts?”

“You know what, we are.” Bucky grabs the remote and switches the television off. “We’re the ones who were _there_ when the jive was on every dance floor in the city.”

“Bucky was the best dancer in Brooklyn. All the girls agreed and they all wanted to partner up with him.” Steve says, looking back down at his sketch. They didn’t seem to realize that Bucky was also poor as dirt and he didn’t have the money for proper dates more than about once a month. They didn’t make the connection that it was _Steve’s_ toes that had gotten bruised to all hell for Bucky to become so good at dancing. 

Such a shame, all the girls said, that Bucky could be so smooth on his feet and Steve couldn’t dance at all.

Steve _could_ dance _well_ , actually. He just couldn’t lead. 

“Okay, so Bucky can dance. That doesn’t tell me what makes _Steve_ an expert,” Natasha is smirking at them like she already has them all figured out and she probably does.

Bucky rolls his eyes, “I mostly had to bribe Steve into being my stand in partner at home whenever I needed to practice learning new dances.” He smiles, looking over at Steve. “He was a good sport about it after a while.”

“ _Fuck_ the lindy hop,” Steve says emphatically. “I was bruised for fucking _weeks_.”

Natasha has an unholy gleam in her eyes. “Let me get this right…. Steve, being the smaller one was naturally the… ah… partner being led?”

Steve crosses his arms.

“ _Steve_ , c’mon now, what’s with the pouting, I already told her you were a good sport.” Bucky throws a popcorn kernel at him. 

“I object to this conversation, actually.” He raises his eyebrows. Yeah, maybe he’s laying the pouting on thick but it’s making Bucky smile and that’s all he really cares about.

“Can you still do it?” Nat looks back and forth between the two of them. “You’re pretty evenly matched in strength, but Steve is still smaller in bulk.”

Bucky positively _leers_

“No. No way. Absolutely not.” Steve snaps his sketchbook closed and stands, intent on escaping. It’s not that he doesn’t _want_ to dance with Bucky again, he does. But he wants it to be just for them, not for practice, not for an audience. 

“Steve!” Bucky catches him by the leg of his sweatpants before he can walk away. “I- _we_ have a reputation to uphold here!”

“I think that we’d more likely damage it than uphold it.” They haven’t _danced_ since Steve was still a ninety pound shrimp. Even with their super strength now, the dynamic has changed so much.

“Oh, c’mon. We’re better than that, it’ll be fine. Steve, _please_.”

He swallows hard and sighs and Bucky grins because he knows he’s won before Steve even concedes. He just can’t say no when Bucky is looking at him like that, big eyes and pouted lips. “You’re a menace, Bucky Barnes.”

“Put the record on,” Bucky returns, eyes crinkling at the corners with his smile, his beautiful, happy smile that Steve will do anything to keep on his face. “You know the song.”

He does know. The one that Bucky had played over and over until Steve was sick of it. He pulls the Benny Goodman album from its sleeve and sets it on the turntable. He rolls his shoulders out, sets the needle on the vinyl. When he turns around to the first drums of Sing, Sing, Sing, Bucky has pushed the couch out of the way with Nat on it to give them more space to dance. Not that they’d ever had much space before but they were much smaller back then. Bucky’s already flushed, his eyes sparkling as he hold his left hand out, bowing just slightly like he’s some kind of gentleman. 

Steve takes a deep breath and reaches out to clasp his hand. And then they _dance_. The thing about swing is that it’s an exercise of trust. If you don’t have faith in your partner, then it will never work. The steps come back to him as easy as breathing; twirl in and spin, heel, toe, kick, heel, toe, rock step, swing out. They probably have different names, he wouldn’t know. He just knows how to move in time and he has complete trust. That’s why they work so well, even after all these years. Bucky pushes him out and to the side, spinning him under his arm and switching their hand grip. This is Steve’s _favorite_ part. He steps in just as Bucky tips forward and rolls right across Bucky’s back, letting go of his hand just to catch the one on the other side as his feet land on the ground and Bucky pulls him under his arm, back to the front.

He thinks Natasha might be wolf whistling, might be clapping, but his world has narrowed down, completely attuned to just him and Bucky and the beat of the song. The dance they’d perfected through years of evenings spent stepping on each other and hitting the floor countless times and their neighbors complaining and Steve getting asthma attacks. He’d been wrong in assuming they couldn’t do it anymore. It’s muscle memory. Bucky’s hands drop to his waist and he knows what’s coming but it still takes his breath away when he gets lifted, his fingers digging into Bucky’s shoulders as he gets dipped back and then pushed straight up into a handstand. It had taken him forever to master this, to remember to keep tight and point his toes, but now it’s next to no effort at all. “I hate you,” he half gasps, half whispers.

“Yeah, yeah.” Bucky drops him back down, swinging him to one side and then the other and then flips him over his shoulder. Steve lands on his feet, grabbing Bucky’s waiting hand and step-spins back so they’re face to face again. Bucky pokes the corner of Steve’s smile with his free hand. “Liar, you think it’s fun.”

“Maybe. I guess the world will never know.” 

“Who cares about the world? _I_ know.”

It’s on the tip of his tongue to say something sappy, something like _you are my world_ but he doesn’t. After all, this had only ever been about practice. Bucky had a sweetheart, someone he was in love with. Someone he didn’t want Steve to know about. All that practice to go out and show it off to her. He bites his lip and steps back, a hand on his heaving chest, pretending the sting is from exertion. “Christ, alright. We’ve proven our point,” he looks over at Natasha so he doesn’t have to look at Bucky and think about the truth. “Happy now?”

“I concede. You can keep the title of dancing experts. Great show, fellas.”

Steve smiles, all teeth and no heart, “Well, I am the star spangled man with a plan, after all. I’m all about putting on a show.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok so i watched approximately a billion film reels of dancing from the 30s combined with my own experience as a dancer and i tried to describe swing dancing to the best of my ability i hope you all were able to visualize the dance from that i tried my best ok. there's going to be one more chapter after this and listen... im generally open to suggestions and im willing to write it if you want the chapter to be explicit. i've been debating back and forth whether or not i should take it to that rating since i started writing this and i still havent decided so weigh in and ill do whatever yall want okay. love u all stay safe


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for the first scene of this chapter because of a semi graphic paragraph where steve is thinking about what happened in the valkyrie so read with caution.

There’s ice in his veins when Steve wakes, choking on phantom water but the salt he tastes isn’t the ocean, it’s just his tears, finally unlocked. The sheets are sweaty and tangled around him, _suffocating_ him. They rip when he yanks at them, trying to get out of the mess. “Fuck,” he mumbles. Of course it would be too much to expect the nights to get better even though the days are bearable now.

“Steve?” The knock at the door is quiet but Bucky doesn’t even wait for a response before he’s cracking it open and poking his head into the room. “Hey, you okay?” His hair is sticking up everywhere, pillow mussed. 

“Nightmare,” Steve swallows hard, digging his shaking fingers into his palms. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Bucky steps further into the room, his bare feet silent on the rug. “I was still awake. It’s barely after one.” He hoists himself onto Steve’s bed, seemingly not noticing the sweaty, ripped up sheets. “Come here.” It’s a relief to slump into his open, waiting arms. To tuck his head against the hollow of Bucky’s shoulder and breathe him in, holding on tight. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Not really. It’s bad enough that it’s in his head every night; he doesn’t want to try to put into words what it’s like to be so terrified but to willingly suck the icy water into your lungs. To wedge yourself under the edge of the half destroyed pilot’s seat so that your body stays under the water. To want to die more than you want to escape the pain, the ceaseless pain as your toes and fingers freeze, and then your arms and your stupid body keeps you conscious even though you’re choking down mouthfuls of water, trying to get it over with. It probably wasn’t hours, but it felt like it. “Have you ever drowned?” Maybe it’s wrong of him to ask that. He doesn’t mean it in a prying way, not trying to force Bucky to talk about his time in Hydra. 

Bucky’s got his fingers stroking through Steve’s hair and they pause at his question. “Yeah.”

“ _Yeah_ ,” Steve licks his lips, counts each beat of Bucky’s heart in his ear. Bucky makes a noise, low in his chest, and curls himself tighter around Steve. And he can’t… he can’t make himself let go, not tonight. “Will you stay?”

“No,” Bucky says softly, his fingers gripping the back of Steve’s neck so he can’t pull away. “Not in here. But you can come to my room. I’ve got fresh sheets.”

“Asshole.” Steve smiles against Bucky’s collarbone and pulls back and this time Bucky lets him, but grabs his hand before he gets too far. They don’t talk as they leave Steve’s room, heading to Bucky’s. They don’t speak until they’ve both crawled underneath the cool, dry sheets and are lying in the dark, hands still clasped between them. An anchor. It’s only due to his enhanced vision that he can see Bucky blinking at him, studying him. “What?”

“Did you think I wanted to dance just to put on a show for Nat?”

“Wasn’t that all it was for?” Steve looks up at the dark ceiling. “For practice in the past and to save your rep as a dancer now?”

Bucky laughs, short and shocked. “It wasn’t just for practice.”

“What?” He turns his head back toward Bucky. “What else would it have been for?”

“All those evenings. I didn’t need _that_ much practice. I just wanted to dance with you.” Bucky squeezes his hand.

“...Why?”

“Why _not_? You’re the only person I could ever just be myself and have fun with. It didn’t matter if I messed up or forgot a step or bruised your toes, you never judged me for it. I didn’t need to impress you. It was just dancing for the sake of enjoying it and nothing else.” Bucky kicks his shin lightly. “You’re the best partner I ever had and you damn well know it.”

Huh. Steve purses his lips, fighting the smile tugging at the corners. “Is that so?” He squeezes Bucky’s hand and wishes he had the nerve to ask to be held closer, to rest his ear over Bucky’s chest and be lulled to sleep by the rhythm of his breathing. “Better than whoever you wrote that sweetheart letter to?”

“Steve.”

“What?”

“Go to sleep.”

***

Growing up in the Rogers household, Steve had learned from toddlerhood to pick up after himself. His mother had insisted even if they had nothing else, they would have a clean house and since it was only the two of them it hadn’t been that difficult to keep to that rule. Bucky, on the other hand, is a slob and he always has been. It’s nothing major, but he leaves his clothes lying on the floor, leaves his dishes in the sink, doesn’t notice when there’s water spots in the bathroom mirror or toothpaste residue in the sink. Now, the tower has cleaning staff, but it feels wrong to ask them to come and clean up after them even when that’s what they’re hired for. 

Steve waits until Bucky has left for his therapy appointment to grab the laundry basket and start the process of going through each room, collecting any discarded clothing from where it may have been left. A sweatshirt left in the kitchen, a pair of socks under the edge of the couch. Most of the clothing is in Bucky’s bedroom, either on the chair in the corner or wadded up on the floor. Steve sighs and sets the laundry basket on Bucky’s bed and starts grabbing them. He checks the pockets of each item before it goes in the basket- he’d learned that lesson after accidentally washing Bucky’s phone. There’s nothing in most of them, but he does find some crumpled up dollar bills and some change, a little bottle of oil for Bucky’s arm, a paper from a fortune cookie. 

He grabs a soft jacket from the arm of the chair, draping it over the side of the laundry basket to stick his hand in one of the pockets. Paper brushes his fingers and he pulls the sheet out, uncrumpling it. It’s not that he _means_ to read it, but the words jump out at him, stark on the page.

_If you’re reading this, Steve Rogers,_

Steve sucks in a breath, dropping the paper. They’re doing so good, they’re getting better. It can’t be a suicide note. He grabs the jacket again, checking the other pocket. And he pulls out an envelope, crumpled up but he can still read the script that’s played behind his eyes since he first saw it.

It’s the _sweetheart letter_

Holy _shit_.

He barely registers sinking to the floor, his fingers grabbing for the letter again, greedy to read the words on the page. The words written for _him_? It can’t be. There’s no way. It can’t. And yet. 

_If you’re reading this, Steve Rogers, there’s no doubt in my mind that you’re blaming yourself instead of letting the blame rightfully rest on whatever miserable bastard did me in for good. Stop it. You know I can’t stand when you get all melodramatic like that and though I may not be around to swat the back of your head and tell you to knock it off, you damn well better honor my memory and pretend I did it anyway. It’s a nasty business, war. Doesn’t make everything that happens your fault. Now that that’s out of the way, I’m sure since you’re a nosy but righteous little shit that you struggled with yourself before finally giving in and opening this envelope. After all, I never mentioned having a steady girl back home, or anywhere for that matter, so without reading it how could you know who to deliver it to? Surprise, Sweetheart. Here’s all the things I never told you, but always desperately wished I could._

_I think the first time I fell in love with you was the time you slapped me across the face for making my sister cry. I was being a dick and I deserved it. It didn’t actually hurt, but it sure as hell got my attention. That was the first time I noticed the way your eyes almost glow and you flush high on your cheekbones when you’re really angry. I was thirteen and all of a sudden I understood what it was like to want to kiss someone so badly you can’t even breathe with the wanting. It terrified me. Not because I’ve ever been ashamed of who I am, of the fact that I want you and not a girl. It terrified me because I know what they do to boys who want to kiss other boys when it’s dark and they catch them. I was never scared for myself, but I couldn’t do that to you. Couldn’t even consider asking you if maybe you felt that way too. You’re too important to put in danger like that. Above all else, I have to make sure you’re safe._

_I fell in love with you every time you stepped on my toes and fell on my face when we were learning to dance. I fell in love with the way you look when you’re drawing. Especially when you’re drawing me. I fell in love with your awful, angry, giant heart of gold. I fell in love with your black eyes and your stupid crooked nose because you just can’t seem to stop getting your face smashed into brick walls. I fell in love with the blood on your split lips and I wanted to kiss them better every single time. I fell in love when you didn’t care that I get the shakes sometimes because you understand what it’s like to have your body betray you too. You see, Steve, I think I fall in love a little more every time I look at you. I’m just gone on you and there’ll never be anyone else and that’s okay. Even if I never have you like that, it’s okay. Because I’ve still spent my life loving you and I’m grateful for every bit of it._

_Don’t hate me for never telling you, Steve. I know you’ve got Agent Carter now and well, that answers the questions I never asked, doesn’t it? I’m happy for you, really. You should get married and have the life you want to have. You deserve the world and someone who can give it to you. I’ll never be that someone, especially now. Because if you’re reading this, Steve, that means I’m gone. I hope that I can trade my place in the afterlife for a chance to watch over you. I don’t necessarily believe in guardian angels, but I’d be one for you if I could._

_You’re gonna get to go home from the war, Steve, I know it. You’ll find a way to be happy even without me because you’re too good and the world owes you that. I hope your dreams come true, whatever they are. I hope you draw every beautiful thing that makes your fingers itch to hold a pencil. I hope you laugh. I hope you find someone that loves to dance with you as much as I have. So please, for me, live your life to the fullest and know that though I’m missing you and you’re missing me, I’m with you in spirit. Know that you have been so, SO loved, Sweetheart._

_With my entire heart, Bucky._

Steve can’t breathe. He’s gripping the letter so tightly the paper is nearly tearing, a single tear dropping onto it, smearing Bucky’s name. He slaps a hand over his mouth, drawing his knees to his chest. Bucky loves him. Bucky _loves_ him. Bucky loves _him_. He can’t… he doesn’t even know what to do with that information. The fucking letter was his _all along_. Bucky has loved him _all along_. He reads it again. 

As much as he’d been hurt by the letter, by the idea of some girl Bucky had never seen fit to tell him about, he’s glad now that he never read it. He’s so glad because he can’t imagine having this prose, this infinite tenderness put into words living in his head next to the awful grief of Bucky being dead and Steve wanting nothing more than to go with him. It would have been even more awful than how he already felt.

But Bucky is alive and here and he _loves Steve_. And it’s all clicking into place and all the little gifts _were_ him flirting and he wanted to dance with him because he loves him and, _and_.

He’s laughing he thinks, through the flood of tears.

Eventually he drags himself up from the floor, he folds the letter up and slots it back into its envelope and tucks it gently into his own pocket because fuck it, it’s _his_. He takes the load of laundry to the washing machine and starts it and cleans up the rest of the apartment in a haze, not thinking about the task at hand at all. His hands are shaking, overwhelmed with the adrenaline. He needs to _run_ , to expel energy. He doesn’t even know what he’s going to do when Bucky gets back. 

One thing’s for sure, he’s not letting one more night pass with them apart from one another. He nearly drops a plate. Today, after a lifetime of wanting, _today_ he gets to kiss Bucky. 

“Jarvis?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Do you know how much longer until Bucky comes back?” He turns the faucet off and dries his hands, leaning against the island. Surely it’s been nearly an hour by now. Surely he’ll be home soon.

“Sergeant Barnes has been in his session for thirty nine minutes. Shall I inform him when he is done that you’re anxious to see him?”

“No!” That would probably only make Bucky think there’s something wrong. He’ll just… waste some more time. It’s not that hard. “Thank you, though. Turn the kitchen light off please.” 

The light flickers off as he walks out of the room. He’d taken Sam’s insistence that he has a nicotine addiction into consideration and stopped smoking _as_ much but he needs it now. He grabs his pack of smokes from his room and heads out onto the balcony, shivering lightly in the wind as he lights up. New York is as loud as it ever is, but he’s starting to get used to the new chaos of it, finally. He doesn’t cringe away from all the sounds anymore, doesn’t hear the electricity humming in his ears nonstop. It’s settled. He’s settled. 

One cigarette down and he lights another, he needs something to do with his hands while he waits.

“I wish you would quit those.”

Steve spins around, his heart slamming against his rib cage as Bucky steps out onto the balcony with him, one hand shoved in his pocket, the other held out. “I’m trying.” He hands the cigarette to Bucky, entire body alive with static running under his skin.

Bucky takes one pull and then puts it out in the ashtray even though it’s not even burned halfway down, ignoring Steve’s waiting hand. 

“I was gonna….” Steve sighs and shakes his head. “How was your session?” His voice is about an octave too high, so many words clogging his throat and he doesn’t know what to _say_.

“Fine.” Bucky squints at him. “You okay?”

“I’m great!” He darts past him, back into the apartment. Fuck. _Fuck_. The letter is burning a hole in his pocket, his heart is burning a hole in his chest, everything he wants to tell Bucky burning a hole on the tip of his tongue. He’s gonna lose his mind before he ever even gets the chance to tell him. 

Bucky follows him into the living room, sitting on the couch, confusion written all over his face as Steve paces back and forth. “Stevie. What’s _wrong_?”

“There’s nothing wrong. Really.” He stops, swallows hard. “I- Bucky.”

“ _What?_ ”

“I….” This is it. “I was doing laundry like I _always_ do because you insist on leaving your clothes everywhere and I.” He runs his fingers over the edge of the envelope in his pocket, just once before he takes a deep breath and holds it up. “I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t see the envelope first. Just my name at the top of the letter.”

Bucky’s gone white as a sheet, his lips parted, eyes wide and horrified. “Steve… Steve, it doesn’t have to change anything. I’m not expecting you to- listen. You were never supposed to see that unless I was gone and then I _was_ gone and you still didn’t see it. You weren’t supposed to see it now but it doesn’t have to change anything, Steve, please-”

“Yes, it does! Bucky, it changes everything.” Steve tosses the letter on the coffee table and steps forward, so close, standing over his friend, his secret, his soulmate. His lover. “You’re so stupid,” he laughs, cupping Bucky’s jaw in his palms and smiling at him. “I love you so much but you’re so stupid if you ever thought that I didn’t. There’s no way I would have ever been happy without you, not ever. The only dreams I have are ones with you in it, right next to me.”

Bucky’s lower lip is wobbling. He’s staring up at Steve, struck seemingly speechless, his hands grasping Steve’s wrists in a white knuckle grip. “Not me, Steve. _Me? Still?_ ”

“Yes, _you_ , you mook. Always.” He drops to his knees, kneeling in front of the couch so they’re face to face instead of him towering above. “I can’t believe you never told me.”

“I can’t believe you’re still running your big mouth instead of kissing me.”

“Well, I was gonna ask permission-”

“Permission given. Whenever. Now come _here_.” Bucky tugs him in, gently bumps their noses together and then kisses him. 

Their lips barely brush and Steve is pulling back, his face burning hot. “I’m probably not… very good at this. I-”

“Sweetheart, I don’t care.” Bucky smiles and leans in, gently nipping at his lower lip. “That’s what practice is for.” He pulls Steve’s hands away from his face and twines their fingers together, squeezing gently. 

Steve closes his eyes, giving himself over. It’s a good thing, to be so loved, to have someone who doesn’t see flaws as what they are. Not to be fixed but to learn together on no timeline. He touches Bucky’s collarbone, feels his heart beat wildly underneath Steve’s knuckles when he fists his hand in the loose t-shirt. His ever steady heart tripping for _Steve_. When he pushes himself up from the floor, further into Bucky’s arms, there’s no protest. Only strong arms wrapping around his waist, drawing him close. His knees slot along the sides of Bucky’s thighs, and he curls his free hand into Bucky’s hair. 

If his cells could melt, could meld into Bucky’s, could become one person with him, they still wouldn’t be close enough to satisfy Steve. He licks the taste of chocolate and tobacco from Bucky’s lips, presses him back into the upholstery. Maybe they both died after all and this is the afterlife they get. A lot of hell around them but just a little heaven in each other; sinners with good hearts. 

“‘M not goin’ anywhere,” Bucky laughs into the kiss, hand under the back of Steve’s shirt, knuckles tracing the line of his spine as if he’s looking to soothe the pain of crooked vertebrae that haven’t plagued Steve in years. He pulls back, eyes crinkled at the corners, glowing with the love in them. “You’re never gettin’ rid of me now.”

“I never wanted to in the first place.” Steve curls forward, settling his face into the curve of Bucky’s neck. “All that stuff in that letter. How did you manage to miss it that I was hung up on you the whole time? I only noticed Peggy because I convinced myself I would never have you.”

“I never claimed to be the smart one. You love me anyway.”

“Yeah, I do.” He kisses Bucky again, slow, learning the shape of his mouth all over again.

Bucky’s content to let him take the lead for the most part, only coaxing him into parting his lips, only hinting in the direction he wants Steve to take it. He scrunches Steve’s shirt up in the back, hands running warm and cool over Steve’s sides. The muscles jump under his touch, goosebumps rising underneath the stroke of his fingers. Steve drops his head back when Bucky starts to kiss and bite his way over his jawline, under his ear. 

“I don’t-” Bucky is breathing hard, his grip on Steve’s waist nearly bruising in its intensity. “I don’t wanna… push this somewhere you aren’t ready to go. If you decide you want to stop, we’ll stop.”

“I just want to be close to you,” Steve says, hushed. “I don’t want to... rush, but that doesn’t mean I want to stop yet either.” They’ve only been hugging for a short time now and now he has the potential for so much _more_. The very thought of it is heady, dizzying. He wants to be touching every inch of Bucky, wants to soak it up and never go without it again. 

Bucky makes a pained noise, his breath hot on Steve’s neck. “I have an idea.” He pulls back, tugging at the hem of Steve’s shirt, working it up until Steve lifts his arms so he can remove it fully. It gets tossed to the side, followed quickly by Bucky’s own but before Steve can really get the chance to look, to admire, Bucky is shifting them. 

They lay lengthwise on the couch, Steve wedged between the back of the couch and Bucky, chest to bare chest. Bucky throws his leg over Steve’s, pulls the blanket down from the arm of the couch and spreads it over them before he tucks himself in as close as they can possibly get, his lips brushing Steve’s. “I bet,” Bucky says softly, “that if they measured them, your oxytocin levels are way too low.”

“What’s that?”

Bucky smiles. “My psychiatrist called it the cuddle hormone.” He touches his lips to Steve’s, the flutter of his lashes as his eyes close a butterfly kiss against Steve’s cheekbone. “You need lots of skin to skin contact. I’m gonna fix you right up.”

“You won’t hear any complaints from me.” He’s drunk on it already, tingling all over, his limbs heavy. Safe here, caged in Bucky’s arms. 

The only place he ever wants to be again. 

***

The leaves are turning orange and falling on the sidewalks in Central Park and Steve has Bucky’s hand in his back pocket while they walk along the footpath, aimless. They’ve got a picnic basket with them, they just need to find the right spot. It’s been a couple of weeks of learning each other in ways that were as stunningly familiar as they were new. In the end, everything has changed and somehow nothing changed at all. They’ve always loved each other best, whether they were aware of it or not. 

Being in a relationship means Steve doesn’t hover at the edge of the room anymore, too anxious to ask for what he wants. He knows Bucky will welcome it when he lays down across his chest, even with no warning. It means lazy mornings and toothpaste kisses and washing each other’s hair in the shower and laughing when they get shampoo in their eyes. It lights Steve up so happy he might just explode with it. And that doesn’t mean he’s magically cured in the head, but it makes it infinitely easier to get through the bad stuff when he has some good stuff too.

Steve takes his packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and at Bucky’s glower he smiles and tosses the carton into the trash can they’re passing. He’s cut back gradually, the serum making the withdrawal go rough but fast. He doesn’t need them to feel close to home now, when he goes to bed with his home in his arms every night. 

“I’m proud of you.” Bucky squeezes Steve’s ass with the hand in Steve’s pocket.

He smiles, shrugging. “One step at a time. I’ll always be fucked up, but I can work hard to not be _quite_ as bad.” Part of that process was finally putting in his resignation with SHIELD. Fury had been beyond pissed, but in the end, Steve had more than served the full length of his army contract and they couldn’t force him to fight anymore. Granted, if there were any more world threatening alien-scale events and they called him in, he wouldn’t be able to sit it out, if only for the peace of his mind. Sam had agreed to take the mantle of Cap, getting promoted through the ranks of SHIELD. That had been an interesting press conference and subsequent worldwide reaction, for more ways than one.

Steve had been there and he’d refused to take any questions. He’d had a speech prepared before he ever went in front of the cameras. Yes, he was retiring from active duty. No, his serum wasn’t failing, he was simply ready to step back, to live a normal life with the man he loves. 

The conservative party was having a field day with that one, back and forth about which idea they hated more- having a Cap that’s in a homosexual relationship or having a Cap that’s black. Steve doesn’t much care what they think. The pushback always feels louder than the support, but there’s been a _lot_ of support. Thousands of emails from fans saying his coming out meant something huge for them. Sam has quickly collected his own wildly enthusiastic support too. It’s a win-win. They’ve been having training sessions whenever they can fit them in, for Sam to get the hang of using the shield. He’d even let Steve try out his wings. 

Bucky tugs him toward a maple tree and takes the picnic basket from him to spread the sheet on the cushion of fallen leaves underneath it. He’s humming under his breath as he unloads the food they’d brought and Steve loves him, loves him, loves him. 

“Steve.” Bucky looks up at him, lips turning up at the corners.

“What?”

He doesn’t get an answer in words, instead Bucky pulls his sketchbook and pouch of pencils from the bottom of the basket and hands them over. Because he knows Steve. Anticipated the itch in his fingers to commit Bucky’s likeness to paper at every opportunity and came prepared. Steve takes the book with a grin, leaning back against the trunk of the tree and already shaping Bucky’s form out in loose lines. When they get home he’ll be able to add in the details, like the way the sun is filtering golden through the leaves and shining on Bucky’s hair, like the way his eyes are bright and his lips are bitten red. For now, this is enough.

“We should get a place in Brooklyn again,” Bucky sprawls out on the sheet, his face tilted toward the sunlight. “Something to call our own.”

“I’d like that.” Though he’d hated the apartment that SHIELD had set him up with when he’d first defrosted, it would be different if he found somewhere together with Bucky. It’ll never be the city it was, but the past would swallow them whole even if they had a chance to go back. They’re too different now but Brooklyn is different too. “Maybe a real house instead of an apartment. We could try to grow a garden.”

“You couldn’t keep a plant alive if your life depended on it.” Bucky grins, big and bright. “But sure. We can try.”

Steve nods, setting his sketchbook aside and taking one of the sandwiches and a bag of chips from the picnic basket. His mother had kept a variety of plants in their little apartment and when she had passed, responsibility for them had fallen to Steve. It hadn’t even been a month before they were all yellow and wilting and not even Winnie Barnes’ coaxing could bring them back to life by the time that Steve had asked for help. “We’ll just grow an entire garden of succulents. I heard those are hard to kill.” He rips the chip bag open gently- there’s been way too many incidents of him scattering food everywhere because he opened the packaging with too much force.

“I believe that you’ll find a way.” Bucky opens his mouth, pointing first at it and then at the chip bag and back again.

Leaning over, Steve drops a few of the hot cheetos in Bucky’s waiting mouth. “We’ll see.”

“I guess we will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and then they lived happily ever after but they still both went to therapy and worked hard because love isn't a miracle cure for mental illness no matter what the romance novels try to tell you. and they did grow a garden and they had nat and sam over to visit often and sam was an awesome cap and thanos never happens. 
> 
> and we come to the end of another journey. thank you for hanging around to read this with me, i appreciate you more than words can ever say. your support means the world. i don't know when i may post another fic because what im going to try to do with this free time that quarantine has granted me is finally write an original fantasy novel that ive been thinking of for about three years now and im going to try to get that published traditionally. so wish me luck and i hope i see you soon! i might write up some one shots maybe set in the me and my heart universe im not sure but im definitely not abandoning stevebucky. as always, you can talk to me through my social medias if you want!!

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on:  
> Tumblr: stevebuckyrightsonly (marvel side blog) or pressrestart (main)


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